Enterprise Headlines and Highlights, 2013-01-04

A half-million lines of custom code wasn’t enough to produce a viable Dynamics AX ERP (enterprise resource planning) system for point-of-sale and RFID products distributor ScanSource, according to a lawsuit it has filed against Avanade, the joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture.

[No, a half million lines *is* the problem … -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Key improvements include:

Virtual nodes, which improve the granularity of capacity increases and dramatically improve repair and rebuild times in larger clusters. See also this post on upgrading an existing cluster to vnodes.
CQL3 improvements, notably the addition of collection types, queryable system information, and a CQL-native protocol.
Request tracing is available to both CQL and classic Thrift requests, and can also be managed programatically.
Atomic batches address the possibility of mid-batch coordinator failure.
Configurable policies for disk failure
Last but not least, many performance improvements to memory usage, column indexes, compaction, streaming, startup time, and more.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Cassandra NoSQL distributed database has been updated to better use larger servers through the introduction of virtual nodes and configurable policies for disk failure.

The newly released Cassandra 1.2 also features the ability to perform atomic batch operations, and comes with a new version of the Cassandra Query Language, CQL3.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Highlights for the second-generation high-performance, NoSQL database include clustering across virtual nodes, inter-node communication, atomic batches and request tracing. In addition, Cassandra 1.2 also marks the release of version 3 of the Cassandra Query Language (CQL3), to simplify application modeling, allow for more powerful mapping, and alleviate design limitations through more natural representation.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Self-dealing? -DBM]
Workday, a software company with headquarters on Stoneridge Mall Road in Pleasanton, plans to gradually move its workforce into buildings a few blocks away in Stoneridge Corporate Plaza, which is being acquired by NPC Holdings, LLC, a wholly-owned affiliate of Dave Duffield.

This is a strategic investment for Duffield and his venture, NPC, which is separate from Workday. NPC will continue to manage the space as a multi-tenant office and Workday will occupy some of the space as an expansion of its corporate headquarters.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

But “citing the importance of the Reconnaissance Article in the Protocol and the importance of a meaningful penalty” the jury has now decided to fine Oracle US$15,200 (NZ$18,350) and deduct the final five days of the second testing period – from April 26-30.

The fine is small change to the mega-rich American syndicate. But the loss of testing days will hurt them given their current struggles.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In fact, the military stands to save hundreds of millions of dollars from the deal. According to the Armed Forces Press Service, the official DOD news agency, the Air Force estimates $50 million in annual savings, the Army $70 million in annual savings, and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) 10% as compared to its existing Microsoft contracts.

The new enterprise license agreement includes a broad array products, and gives the Air Force, Army and DISA immediate access to the latest Microsoft software, such as Windows 8, Microsoft Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013. The Army and Air Force have been working with Microsoft to create standard Windows 8 configurations, and could begin adopting the new operating system soon.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“The Tizen was born as Samsung hoped to lighten its growing dependence on Google on concerns that its top position in the smartphone market may weaken following the Google- Motorola tie-up,” Byun Han Joon, an analyst at KB Investment & Securities in Seoul, said by phone today. “Intel always wanted to boost its presence in the mobile CPU market.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Tempered optimism. That’s how I’d describe the state of technology recruiting as we move into the New Year,” said Alice Hill, Managing Director of Dice.com. “For every pair of companies likely to staff up in 2013, there’s a company saying they’re not looking to grow their technology workforce in the immediate future. So there will be good job opportunities and there will be hiring, but we’re expecting steady, modest growth, not a snowball gaining speed into an avalanche.”

Asked if the time to fill open technology positions had changed compared to last year, more than half the respondents (55%) said it had lengthened (including 16 percent who labeled the change “substantial”). Accounting for the slower hiring process, nearly half the hiring managers (47%) pointed to an inability to find qualified applicants, while another third (33%) cited a desire to wait for “the perfect match.”

Likewise, there is no haste by qualified technology professionals to move on in their careers. Seven out

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Time and time again, our clients express an aversion to co-mingling data. They want us to have a hard physical separation. They want us to have a virtual private database.

RW: Isn’t that really just multi-instance like Taleo and RightNow, which weren’t pure SaaS plays?

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Across the Atlantic, European regulators also aren’t yet finished with their probe — a process once thought to be more likely to produce the sort of tough concessions Google critics seek. And those companies, back in Washington, have been privately meeting with Justice Department officials and are said to be urging them to re-open the Google case, which the agency conceded to the FTC in 2011 after the two regulators fought for primacy in the investigation.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

After people activated a record-breaking 17.4 million iOS and Android devices on Christmas Day, the following week saw record-smashing activity as well: over 50 million iOS and Android-powered smartphones and tablets activated, and a staggering 1.76 billion apps downloaded.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“no support for the proposition that Amazon has expressly or impliedly communicated that its Appstore for Android possesses the characteristics and qualities that the public has come to expect from the Apple APP Store and/or Apple products.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

What does 2013 hold in store for the BI industry?

Business transformation enabled by the cloud. In 2012, Oracle made clear its intent to be a major supplier of cloud computing, and set out its credentials and innovation strategy to be a leader in cloud computing. What excites me is how we will see opportunities for our customers to use cloud computing to deliver analytics-as-a-service. We already have customers creating new business models from selling insight on information they own to third parties – logistics and supply chain companies, and healthcare informatics companies are good examples. I expect that to continue.

Secondly, a revolution in customer experience fuelled by customer and social media analytics. It’s become clear that social media has the ability to forge new and more immediate relationships with customers. Today’s business-technology leaders must go well beyond passive acceptance of social media and become passionate and unconditional zealots for the social-driven

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Microsoft has reached an Orwellian impasse, in which it cannot tell the truth — even to itself. It is blinded by its own hallucinations about how the market is operating. The result is that its public pronouncements entirely lack credibility…
At some point, the accusing finger has to swing back toward Ballmer, who took over as CEO from Gates in 2000…
At this point and at the very least, Gates needs to step in and ask his friend of many years to step down. I first raised the question of Ballmer’s tenure 18 months ago. He has had ample opportunity to turn the ship around and hasn’t done it. If Microsoft is to recover from its nosedive, it will need to address multiple institutional failures — with someone else in the driver’s seat.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Microsoft needs to make Azure a more compelling environment for mission-critical enterprise applications and services while reducing migration hassles. To its credit, it’s evolving Windows Azure from platform-as-a-service (PaaS) To infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Earlier last year, it added persistent-state virtual machine support to Azure, allowing it to accommodate a wider variety of software, including Linux. Microsoft also introduced Hadoop for Azure and support for MapReduce.

In late December, Microsoft added job scheduler support for Windows Azure Mobile Services, and improved scaling for Azure website services and support for SQL Data Sync Services from within the Azure Management Portal. In 2013, it needs to further its build out of its cloud platform to keep it competitive with Amazon EC2, IBM’s SmartCloud and other cloud services.

5. Big Data: When it comes to big data, IT’s latest megatrend, Microsoft isn’t thought of in the same breath as Oracle, with its Exadata Mach

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

What’s selling in Fusion Applications?: Oracle spent years and billions of dollars to develop its next-generation Fusion Applications, which can be deployed both on-premises and in Oracle’s cloud.

Oracle has touted that it has 100 Fusion products for sale now, spread over a number of functional pillars, such as financials, CRM (customer relationship management) and HCM (human capital management).

On the conference call, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said the company is seeing rapid growth in Fusion across-the-board in CRM and in HCM.”

It’s also beating rival cloud HCM vendor Workday “in the majority of deals,” Ellison said. Oracle is also having success with Fusion CRM against Salesforce.com, according to Hurd.

But co-president and CFO Safra Catz said “most of the [Fusion] pillars are doing very well.” That means some, perhaps ERP (enterprise resource planning) among them, aren’t catching fire just yet. Oracle is likely not worried about that, however, given the size of its E-Business S

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

So what’s the big theme for 2013?

“Work the way you live.” Consumerization is here. It’s time to really embrace it. We’re doubling down on the Enterprise. It’s an increasingly important part of Google, and a place where we plan to invest and to support our customers.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“SAP has been using social media since before it was even called that—for many years; and we continue to evolve as new platforms and new customer needs emerge,” Yolton said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Linux-based Tizen, supported by other companies such as Intel, has been around for a while now but has never had a phone of its own. Samsung’s own Bada OS was folded into it earlier this year, and now rumors say that a partnership between NTT DoCoMo and Samsung will produce the first Tizen handset relatively soon, perhaps as early as this year’s Mobile World Congress.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

If you want your CRM system to succeed, then take a deep breath and do these three things.

1. Forget about the B.S. and focus on the reports…
2. Invest in an administrator…
3. Embrace it or suffer.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Of the 11 purchases announced by Oracle this year, all but one have been for cloud-related companies. Ellison once denounced talk of the cloud market as “gibberish,” Waters notes. But asked two months ago whether he had a new appreciation for the business, he said: “I don’t accept the notion I didn’t get the cloud. I think I invented it.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

All HP has to do is show that it has actually built some marketable software out of the $10.3 billion acquisition. The question is, where is that software?

Stanley Morrical isn’t convinced such software exists, so last week he sued HP in Federal court in San Jose, CA, accusing the company of fraud. Morrical is not buying HP’s claims that Autonomy executives duped it into buying the British software maker last year through “serious accounting improprieties, misrepresentation and disclosure failures.” HP has asked US and British regulators to investigate for criminality.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Is it possible to short a private company? -DBM]

Mr. Preston-Werner’s own company is something of a proxy for how he sees the world. GitHub has no managers among its 140 employees, for example. “Everyone has management interests,” he said. “People can work on things that are interesting to them. Companies should exist to optimize happiness, not money. Profits follow.” He does, however, retain his own title and decides things like salaries.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Now, for Windows 7 and why it’s great:

Performance over Vista is vastly improved. I’m a serious user of Nikon Capture NX2, and the performance change change is incredible. For example, adjusting low-light noise in a complex photo used to take minutes and it now takes seconds.
The thing is stable and works. Even though the product is beta, it doesn’t crash. Yes, it’s rough around the edges and some things still don’t function properly, but in general it’s great.
The support infrastructure is mature. Finding answers to obscure questions is straightforward because the Windows installed base is so large. With Google’s help, technical knowledge and assistance are easy to find.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Mobile cloud computing is a trillion dollar opportunity. Connecting to new cloud-based services from anywhere, anytime using mobile laptops, tablets and smart phones. There are numerous opportunities for new cloud-based services. Additionally, the entire infrastructure technology stack needs to be re-written, to enable this mobile cloud computing paradigm.

We are going to see the next generation of multi-billion revenue franchises created, a continued shifting of profit pools, and the disruption, and eventual death, of several large publicly-traded legacy vendors.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

1. Hybrid cloud growth
2. Growth of mobile cloud computing
3. Focus on beautiful applications
4. Arrival of social in all cloud solutions
5. Need for the ‘glocal’ cloud
6. Increased importance of cloud security
7. Bring your own cloud (BYOC) boom
8. Rise of the geopolitical cloud
9. Spotlight on the clean cloud
10. Rise of the cloud-based networked enterprise

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

We’re particularly bullish on the ongoing innovation we’re seeing in a number of startups and growth-oriented companies focused on Big Data/analytics, software-defined networking, storage, health-care IT and the social enterprise. Thanks to the rapid adoption of cloud technologies and the consumerization of IT, companies continue to exploit massively disruptive forces that are changing the face of enterprise technology as we know it today, and their businesses are growing at a more rapid pace.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Of the more than 20,000 households interviewed, just over half used wireless (i.e. cellular) phones for all or nearly all phone calls — 35.9 percent were wireless-only, and 15.9 percent had a landline but rarely used it. That adds up to 51.8 percent of all households, which is less than 2 percent more than for the same period last year.

Why such a small increase? While younger people are adopting wireless phones as their only phone in record numbers, older folks are hanging onto their landlines. The percentage of people going wireless only steadily decreases as age increases: Only a quarter of those aged 45-64 were totally wireless, and just a tenth of those above age 64. That said, every age segment saw their wireless-only population increase by between 1 and 5 percent.

The highest percentage of wireless-only users appears to be among adults living with unrelated adult roommates — 75.9 percent, almost three times the proportion of people living only with spouses or other adult famil

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

He received 2011 compensation of $378 million, one of the biggest pay packages on record, boosted by $376.2 million in stock awards that he’ll get over a decade.

“It pales by comparison because last year’s million-share grant was highly extraordinary,” said Brian Foley, a compensation expert with Brian Foley & Co. “There are other executives who remain unnamed at other companies who would be tempted to go for every last candy in the dish.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Synchronoss hopes to dominate the world of cloud mobile content services while increasing its international presence.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“It is extremely disappointing that HP has again failed to provide a detailed calculation of its $5 billion write-down of Autonomy, or publish any explanation of the serious allegations it has made against the former management team, in its annual report filing today,” Lynch said in an e-mailed statement. “Furthermore, it is now less clear how much of the $5 billion write-down is in fact being attributed to the alleged accounting issues, and how much to other changes in business performance and earnings projections.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Samsung filed a document in federal court in San Jose, Calif., Dec. 19 indicating that the U.S. Patent Office has declared invalid the entirety of Apple’s patent. The Samsung document lists portions of the patent that were struck down on reexamination on the basis that prior patents covered the same inventions.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

An Amazon spokeswoman said in an emailed statement that the problem was caused by an issue in the company’s load balancing service, which distributes traffic across its network of servers. Such load balancing problems at Amazon have stalled Netflix services several times before. Netflix, which began switching from its own servers to AWS in 2009, has previously said that while it’s “easy and common to blame the cloud for outages because it’s outside of our control,” the service has helped improve the availability of its service.

According to Dines, one way to protect against cloud-based malfunctions are cloud to cloud continuity services that, in the event of an outage, allow traffic to be automatically routed onto another cloud center – either within the same vendor’s network, or to a second vendor’s cloud center. Dines says this form of disaster recovery is in its infancy because of the complexity in matching formats between two discrete virtual server systems. CIOs are also just be

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Another challenge for Microsoft – and Rudder – is ensuring that innovations created under his aegis at Microsoft Research aren’t squelched because they threaten the revenue streams of existing businesses. In an email, Cherry said “the real problem is bringing the innovation to market. It can be argued that many Microsoft innovations may fail in the market because the company is overly concerned with minimizing any negative impact innovation might have on the market for the Windows OS or the Office productivity suite.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

With things heating up in this space, we would not be surprised if Marketo gets acquired by some company like Salesforce before the ink dries on Oracle’s Eloqua acquisition.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

At CloudBeat, VentureBeat’s recent customer-focused cloud conference, I caught up with Sanjay Poonen, president and corporate officer at SAP, who specializes in technology and product innovation. That afternoon, Poonen was joined on stage by one of the company’s biggest healthcare customers McKesson to discuss ongoing concerns about the cloud and their reasons for selecting SAP.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

President for Global Solutions at SAP AG, Sanjay Poonen, discusses cloud expansion and mobile reach. He speaks with Cory Johnson on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Shai Agassi is a smart man, and I like him and his idea. But building and operating a company are different things, which require different skills,” Israel Corporation controlling shareholder Idan Ofer told China’s “Southern Weekly”, in his first public comments since firing Better Place’s founder and CEO. “It is ordinary for a founder to leave management in Israel, and Shai Agassi still owns 10% of Better Place,” Ofer, who serves as chairman of the electric car company, added.

[Read his comments about Steve Jobs’ fair business dealings and honesty … -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

ORACLE will start to feel the HANA effect

This year, replacements of ORACLE databases with SAP HANA were immaterial at the scale of ORACLE’s database business. Their strong PR reactions indicated though, how worried they seem to be. In 2013, they should feel HANA in the sense that they will have to fight harder, be more aggressive with discounts and maintenance concessions, as their customers will bring the HANA card to the negotiation table. Not a lot of this will make it to the public, but their PR could continue to be a good indicator.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

For the problems that Java has and the security issues that surround the software, Oracle doesn’t provide nearly enough updates — according to Sophos, security patches are released only three times a year. The security updates include the option of disabling the Java web plugin, which eliminates a lot of the security risks found with Java, and allowing the user to set security levels.

However good the security updates are, Java is still going to be one of the primary targets for bad guys, as PC Advisor explained:

That’s because hackers know many people do not keep the Java plug-in for browsers up to date, leaving old flaws open to exploitation. This has resulted in a high success rate for attackers. In 2011, an exploit integrated into the Blackhole toolkit, a hacker favorite, had more than an 80 percent success rate, according to HP’s security research division.

You can add the new security updates, but habits aren’t going to change. The bulk of computer users are going to continue

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Here’s the list of the first six stores planned by the company in 2013.

The Shops at La Cantera, San Antonio, Texas
Dadeland Mall, Miami, Fla.
Beachwood Place, Beachwood, Ohio
Westfield San Francisco Centre, San Francisco
City Creek Center, Salt Lake City
St. Louis Galleria, St. Louis

Microsoft says it opened 51 stores in 2012, but those included specialty “popup” stores that were opened for the holidays with a limited selection of products. Those specialty stores will stay open into the new year, and in some cases Microsoft is turning them into permanent full-line retail locations. (The Miami, San Francisco, St. Louis and Salt Lake City stores above are examples.)

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In the last year Google has scored an impressive string of wins, including at the Swiss drug maker Hoffmann-La Roche, where over 80,000 employees use the package, and at the Interior Department, where 90,000 use it.

One big reason is price. Google charges $50 a year for each person using its product, a price that has not changed since it made its commercial debut, even though Google has added features. In 2012, for example, Google added the ability to work on a computer not connected to the Internet, as well as security and data management that comply with more stringent European standards. That made it much easier to sell the product to multinationals and companies in Europe.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The fact that Microsoft is making these ads at all, though, shows just how nervous the company is about Google encroaching on its territory.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Many people want to engage with the Enterprise Irregulars. Here is the complete membership list, with Twitter names, so you can converse and share.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Other websites, such as software company Heroku Inc. and social media app Scope, also reported via Twitter service problems of their own that were traced to Amazon operations. Scope Chief Executive Amit Kumar said his engineers devised a way to bypass AWS and restore service. Heroku couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The update will feature a large number of enhancements to Chatter, Salesforce.com’s social collaboration and messaging service, covering areas such as search, content previewing and general usability.

“The improvements to Chatter are much needed,” said analyst Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. “The toughest challenge with products like Chatter and other enterprise social networks is avoiding the social feed deluge. It’s like being buried by email.”

Another new feature for Salesforce.com will allow salespeople to run forecasts by quarters, according to the notes.

“You can forecast up to 12 months or eight quarters in the future or past.” Users will also be able to run forecasts using partner opportunity data.

“Forecasts and partner forecasting helps improve the ability to handle indirect sales,” Wang said. “This joint forecasting should help improve coordination and quota assignment.”

Analytics are also getting an update in the Spring ’13, with the ability to now view dashbo

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Viewing Your Salesforce World in Microsoft® Outlook®
Available in: Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer Editions
User Permissions Needed
To display the Salesforce Side Panel in Outlook: “Side Panel”
“Email to Salesforce”
AND
“Add Email”
To add Outlook emails to Salesforce:
“Always save email attachments” in your Email to Salesforce
settings
To add email attachments to Salesforce:
When your users select emails in Outlook, they can view contact and lead details in the new Salesforce Side Panel, which is
now generally available. This side panel displays up to a total of four contacts and leads from the From, To, and Cc fields in
your users’ emails.
In addition, your users can:
• See up to a total of four open and past activities and opportunities related to the contacts and leads that appear in the
side panel.
• Manually add emails to either one contact and one account or opportunity, or one lead only.
• See whether Salesforce encounters duplicate contacts or leads, and choose the most ap

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Craig Mundie, one of two Microsoft Corp. executives who took over Bill Gates’ role at the company, has relinquished control of Microsoft’s large research organization and is to retire from the company in 2014.

Mundie is taking on a new role as a senior adviser to Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, according to a memo circulated internally this month and made public Monday.

Eric Rudder, another Microsoft veteran, is taking on responsibility for Microsoft Research, Trustworthy Computing, and the Technology Policy Group, which were all run by Mundie.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Despite the many critics who have forecast our demise, we are strong, we are excited and we are in a position to demonstrate the next stage of mobile computing. It’s a great time to be with BlackBerry.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Microsoft’s Azure Accelerator is back for more — bigger and better than before. “Bigger,” in the sense that it will be hosting 13 start-ups working on the Next Big Thing instead of the eleven it hosted in the first round. And “better,” because the experience garnered in the first round has made Microsoft Israel smarter about how to help direct, guide, and develop the raw talent ensconced within Azure’s Herzliya facilities, said Tzachi (Tzahi (Zack)), Microsoft Israel’s director of business development.

“Over 300 companies, consisting of 1,000 entrepreneurs, applied to enter the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure, but we could only accept 13,” said Weisfeld. Based on the results of the first group, which began its four-month participation in the first accelerator group last March, the chosen few have a busy — and enriching — future to look forward to, with the new program running from December through March.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Workday had the only software that could meet its needs affordably. Seeking bids would have been a waste of time and money, she said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Lombard wrote in his letter that the new payroll system was tested on 1,300 employees this year and failed. Some paychecks were issued to the wrong employees or for the wrong amounts.

Testing began in June, Lombard wrote, and since then “every pay cycle has experienced problems” despite SAP’s repeated assurances that improvements were being made. A second trial run, set for September, has been delayed until at least March.

SAP failed to meet nine of its 44 deadlines in the first eight months of this year, says the 37-page letter. Lombard demanded that SAP fix all of the problems identified by the state, including replacing inexperienced project managers and staff.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“The project … is foundering and is in danger of collapsing,” administrator Jim Lombard wrote to the contractor, SAP Public Services, back in the month of October. Lombard said the new system is not capable of processing “any portion of the state payroll population, let alone the full population of approximately 240,000 employees.”

Andy Kendzie, a spokesman for SAP, said that the company has been meeting its obligations from the contract with the state.

“Considering the project’s complexity, and the many requirements involved in payroll processing, there have been some challenges,” Kendzie said in a statement. “Despite these, SAP remains committed to the overall success of the project.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“The anticipated migration of core systems and critical infrastructure to cloud in the next two years will be complex undertakings; users will be requiring if not demanding strategic direction and guidance from providers across a broad range of areas,” said Tom Lamoureux, Global Advisory Leader, KPMG Technology sector. “The lines are blurring across the various types of cloud services; users need and want to understand cloud’s value and immense power much better than they do.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Big patent disputes will be as common in 2013 as they were in 2012, Newman said. “There is really no end in sight,” he said, adding that there is always going to be a huge amount of innovation in the mobile industry, and people will keep wanting patent these innovations to protect them, he said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The technology sector looks to be in fine shape with the news from Oracle. In fact, it could be said that Oracle’s health bodes well for the entire economy. Oracle sells products to businesses that are clearly spending beyond what it had forecast. Despite the good news, caution is warranted based on valuation. Analysts expect the company to grow profits by 10% from the current fiscal year ending May 31, 2013, to the next.

At current prices, shares trade for 13 times current fiscal year estimated earnings. There was no indication in the results that current estimates are too low; thus the gains in Oracle shares after the news may be of the celebratory sort. Investors tend to bid up shares on positive operating results. I would use the gains as an opportunity to take some money off the table here.
Action:

Consider buying Put options on Oracle after the impressive gains for a one-month trade. Shares are likely to drift lower after the euphoria of the earnings news fades.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

I am questioning whether Oracle’s sales organization — fluent in the language of IT — can learn the “Eloquese” spoken by marketers and other business people.

And as I see it, marketing speak is a completely different language because it describes a unique set of concerns and world views. I imagine Oracle’s sales folks — with their blue shirts and chinos — suddenly plunked down in an exotic land of color and spice. Where the Eloquese speak of beauty, Oracle’s minions talk of middleware. It’s like mixing oil and water. Or as Strother Martin so famously put it in Cool Hand Luke: “What we’ve got here, is failure to communicate.”

It’s a fundamental difference that has its roots in Oracle’s acquisition strategy and has become ingrained in its 18-month sales cycle, famous hostility to customers, and addiction to support fees. Here’s what I mean: Back in 2003, Larry Ellison looked at Oracle’s sales and decided his company was too much of a one-trick company, with its reliance on database sof

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Create a Cloud Decision Framework to keep technology evaluations and investments aligned with business strategies. Business and application assessments and the vendor selection process need to take into account application requirements, role of external cloud resources, and how the RFI will be structured. These process areas will vary by type of company – yet concentrating in application requirements goes a long way to reducing confusion and forcing trade-offs in the middle of a review cycle. The following is an example of a Cloud Decision Framework:

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Salesforce.com will move further into ERP: Even as it reformed its image from a cloud CRM (customer relationship management) software vendor into a full-blown platform player and moved into new application categories, Salesforce.com has yet to make an aggressive push into ERP (enterprise resource planning) software on its own, preferring instead to work with partners such as Workday and Infor.

Salesforce.com has taken one small step in the direction of ERP with the introduction of Work.com, a human resources application for managing employee performance. But Work.com can easily be added to the edges of a customer’s software landscape, versus supplanting a rival product.

While it’s not clear Salesforce.com will either develop a robust ERP suite on its own or acquire a vendor who already has one, in 2013 expect to see the company make some type of move, even if it’s just a strengthening of partner relations. ERP simply takes up too much of the IT budget pie, and Salesforce.com will wan

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Sacks – who was earlier chief operating officer at PayPal – is going to have to be careful about talking business in the yard. His new neighbors include Microsoft nemesis Larry Ellison.

But perhaps he can carpool when he needs to check in at Microsoft. Sacks’ house is right next to a $16 million pad acquired in August by Zynga founder Mark Pincus, who periodically flies to Seattle to visit his company’s engineering office in Pioneer Square. Pincus bought the gray Dutch Colonial at right in the Trulia picture above.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Work.com is a social performance management platform that evolved from a Salesforce.com application previously known as Rypple. When Work.com was announced in September 2012, CMSWire reported that the release would focus in three areas:

Alignment: Brings a fragmented workforce together and aligns all work efforts in a single direction. With Work.com, teams will be managed in real-time social through ongoing feedback and coaching. Social goals will also be visible in Chatter, providing transparency across the entire enterprise.
Motivation: This enables enterprises to acknowledge the work people are doing on a daily basis. Workers can recognize the efforts of colleagues using custom badges. The badges become part of their profile, enabling workers to build up public reputations and identify themselves as experts.
Performance: Work.com will enable performance reviews based on real work done rather than assessments by people who are unaware of how an employee is actually doing

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) agreed to lease an entire San Francisco building that’s scheduled to break ground next month in what would be the first new office high- rise development in the city since 2008.

The deal comprises about 450,000 square feet at Kilroy Realty Corp.’s planned 350 Mission St. tower in the South of Market neighborhood and is the city’s largest office lease this year, San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee said today in a statement. The building is scheduled to break ground in January, with the company expected to begin occupancy in 2015, the mayor said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

How does Oracle plan to maintain Eloqua’s domain
expertise after the closing?
The goal of the combination is to retain Eloqua’s domain expertise,
given their solutions complement Oracle’s offerings. Eloqua brings
significant knowledge and capabilities in the area of modern
marketing automation that are focused on the customer buying
experience. Eloqua’s management team and employees are expected
to join Oracle after the transaction closes and continue their focus
facilitating excellence in marketing.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

•Creates a comprehensive Customer Experience Cloud that transforms how customers buy products and services and how organizations market, sell, service and support them
•Oracle offers best-in-class Sales, Commerce, Service, Content, and Social Clouds
•Eloqua’s modern marketing platform will become the centerpiece of the Oracle Marketing Cloud
•Augmented with Oracle technologies including Analytics and Big Data
•Together, Oracle and Eloqua will deliver exceptional customer experiences that:
•Create brand loyalty and advocacy for a customer’s products and services
•Drive broader purchases and repeat business
•Increase revenue growth by better targeting and more efficient and lower cost selling
•Eloqua’s management team and employees are expected to join Oracle and continue their focus facilitating excellence in marketing

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Where Ryyple was mostly a gamified recognition app, with badges handed out as rewards, Work.com has been bolstered with private manager-employee coaching workspaces and a goal-and-reward system that can be tied to Amazon gift cards.

The Work.com makeover was announced at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event in September, and the debut was promised for Q4. The app is technically still in preview release, but on Tuesday Salesforce.com announced in a blog that the integration with the Sales Cloud is ready. Customers need only contact the company to have the functionality turned on. The formal general release is expected in early 2013.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Eloqua, Inc. (NASDAQ: ELOQ), a leading provider of cloud-based marketing automation and revenue performance management software for $23.50 per share or approximately $871 million, net of Eloqua’s cash. Eloqua’s modern marketing cloud delivers best-in-class capabilities to ensure every component of marketing works harder and more efficiently to drive revenue.
The combination of Oracle and Eloqua is expected to create a comprehensive Customer Experience Cloud offering to help companies transform the way they market, sell, support and serve their customers. The combined offering is expected to enable organizations to provide a highly personalized and unified experience across channels, create brand loyalty through social and online interactions, grow revenue by driving more qualified leads to sales teams, and provide superior service at every touchpoint.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle has agreed to acquire Eloqua, a SaaS company that describes itself as a “provider of cloud-based marketing automation and revenue performance management software” for B2B marketers. The 13-year-old, Toronto-based company was acquired for $23.50 per share, or approximately $871 million.

Oracle is planning to use Eloqua’s assets to build out its multi-channel customer service and lead generation products, Oracle indicated in a press statement.

The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of next year pending regulatory and Eloqua stockholder approval. Eloqua’s board of directors has already greenlighted the deal.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Adds Leading Modern Marketing Platform to the Oracle Cloud to Help Companies Deliver Exceptional Customer Experiences

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

2012 – A year full of innovations in cloud, mobile, applications, analytics, technology and database are helping to fuel growth while SAP has refocused on the values that have shaped the company 40 years ago. SAP takes a leap in 2012 with its goal to make the world run better!

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Moving a large bank from its existing 20 or 30-year old legacy system to a new core banking platform is often compared to changing engines on an airliner flying at 30,000 feet. Volunteer mechanics have been rare.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Add SAP package (aka engine) licensing metrics and the now infamous ‘indirect access’ licensing requirements multiplied across organizations, with hundreds of authorization roles, thousands of users and multiple SAP systems, and this undertaking becomes enormous.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

AWS, the dominant cloud player, is an overwhelming favorite among developers, but it’s good to see Windows Azure showing momentum. Of interest is the lacking presence of OpenStack deployments, with Rackspace as the exception. It is still early days for services that use OpenStack and Cloudstack, the Citrix-led open cloud effort operating as an Apache Software Foundation project.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The integration of Yammer and Microsoft Dynamics CRM is along the lines of the combination of salesforce.com’s CRM and human capital management (HCM, i.e., Work.com) solutions with Salesforce Chatter, SAP Jam and its CRM/HCM/PLM, and Oracle Social Network (OSN) plus Oracle Fusion CRM and Fusion HCM. But, Microsoft Dynamics CRM comes with the advantage of being integrated to both Lync and Skype for unified communications (UC), Lync being the recommendation for intra-enterprise (federated) scenarios and Skype the recommendation for any kind of communication (external, consumer, etc.).

Bob Stutz, the new corporate vice president of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, who was previously at Siebel, pointed out that regardless of the “social CRM” trend, the general CRM purpose remains to acquire the right customers, retain the right customers, and grow the share of wallet (SOW) from existing customers. To that end, Microsoft is enhancing all the CRM realms: sales force automation (SFA), marketing autom

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

For the struggling Canadian company, it’s basically now or never.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Google Inc agreed to sell set-top TV box maker Motorola Home to Arris Group Inc for $2.35 billion in cash and stock, the companies said on Wednesday.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In redacted post-trial filings made public on Monday — essentially its final arguments before the judge — Microsoft argued that it should pay no more than $502,000 per year for Motorola’s H.264 video compression patent, and no more than $736,000 per year for Motorola’s 802.11 Wi-Fi technology.

Motorola — acquired by Google earlier this year, partly for its valuable patent portfolio — submitted a far larger valuation. In its filing, also made public in redacted form on Monday, Motorola said it was due payment of 2.25 percent of
the selling price of Microsoft products such as the Xbox and Windows 7 operating system that use the patents in question.

Motorola argued that a fair cross-licensing deal would result in net payments to Motorola which it would be willing to cap somewhere between $100 million and $125 million per year, solely for the H.264 patent portfolio.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Patent aggregators sift through the issued patents with an expert eye, and provide efficient access to the long tail of patents. When tens of thousands of patents touch a product, hundreds of inventors spread around the globe deserve to be paid. But in the race to market, product companies often ignore the long tail; small inventors have very little power to do anything about this unless they can enlist the help of patent aggregators.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

On Monday, the judge denied Samsung’s request for a retrial seeking to reduce the US$1.05 billion in damages a jury had awarded Apple in August for infringement of some of its patents.

Koh also ruled against Apple’s motion for a permanent injunction on some Samsung products that infringed its patents.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The how is a little tricky, but the what – $1 billion in tax dollars shot to hell – pretty much points to the usual combination of bad planning, scope creep, cost-overruns, and other classic mistakes that you’d think would be avoidable in the 21st century.

Indeed, it’s obvious that this was a typical big bang project gone sour… But with a twist.

The twist can be found in the following statement, made in September, 2006 when the award was made: “As a result of this selection, CSC will use processes within the Oracle 11i product suite to support all logistics functions including product lifecycle management, advanced planning and scheduling, repair and maintenance, and distribution and transportation. The integrated suite (my emphasis) will replace more than 400 legacy systems.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

But this time, Gary L. Reback and Susan A. Creighton are on opposite sides, Steve Lohr reports on Monday in The New York Times.

The two lawyers, and the positions they have taken, point to some striking similarities yet also significant differences between the two high-stakes investigations — and why the pursuit of Google has proved challenging for antitrust officials.

In 1996, Mr. Reback and Ms. Creighton were partners, representing Netscape, the pioneering Web browser company. They wrote a 222-page “white paper,” laying out Microsoft’s campaign to use its dominance of personal computer software to stifle competition from Netscape, the Internet insurgent. After Netscape sent the report to the Justice Department, the head of the antitrust division ordered an investigation.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The company reported a 3% increase in revenue reaching $9.1 billion – exceeding Street estimates by $900 million. Software licenses and subscriptions business performed exceptionally well – soaring 17% year-over-year. This was good enough to exceed management’s most bullish projections three months ago.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

It’s not clear, however, whether those two actions would address a key issue: Google favoring its own solutions in its search results — such as content featured in Google+, its social network.

For example, Yelp has been one of the most prominent opponents of Google, with Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman saying last year that “Google has acted anti-competitively in at least two key ways: by misusing Yelp review content in their competing Places product and by favoring their own competing Places product in search results.”

That’s also a concern of the European Union, which has investigated similar issues in the travel space, where Expedia and TripAdvisor have complained about anti-competitive behavior by Google in flight and travel search results.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle NoSQL Database Release 2.0 include auto-rebalancing, manageability and application programming interface (API) upgrades that address practical deployment and administrative concerns. The auto-rebalancing feature dynamically manages compute and storage capacity to maintain service levels even as processing demands fluctuate as the scale and throughput of data and the number of users varies…

On the development front, Oracle has added a C-based API for those who prefer that language over the existing Java API. A new Large Object API is aimed at handling images, documents and other large objects. An automatic serialization API takes advantage of support for Apache Avro in Release 2.0. A remote procedure call for data serialization, Avro lets you define a schema (using JSON) for the data contained in a record’s value. This compact, schema-based data format also eases integration with Hadoop.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Folks wanted to spend their budgets, continue to want to spend their budgets. We are having an absolutely wonderful December so far. What’s going on in Washington, I don’t know who it’s necessarily influencing today. But I can tell you, our customers have been spending money with us even here in December.”

That quote came from Oracle CFO Safra Catz on the company’s earnings conference call on Tuesday. Catz’s take—and Oracle’s quarter—may be a good indicator that IT spending is showing some strength in what looked to be a challenging fourth quarter.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Calendar 2013 is promising for Oracle thanks to a strong product cycle, market share gains, and healthy secular trends for cloud spend,” FBR Capital Markets analysts said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[If wishes were wings… -DBM]

As usual, Oracle’s hardware sales plummeted during the quarter, down 16% to $1.3 billion. The company has said in the past that this decline reflects the fact that it is not interested in selling low-margin commodity servers from its acquired Sun Microsystems business.

Oracle said that sales of its ‘engineered systems’, such as Exadata and Exalogic, saw 70% quarter-to-quarter growth in bookings. “We sold more than 700 engineered systems this quarter, including Exadata wins at China Mobile, Facebook, Samsung, Time Warner Cable; and great Exalogic wins at Chevron, Vodafone and Wal-Mart,” said co-president Mark Hurd.

Ellison defended the company’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. “Sun has proven to be one of the most strategic and profitable acquisitions we have ever made,” Ellison said. “Sun technology enabled Oracle to become a leader in the highly profitable engineered system segment of the hardware business.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The stock jumped 4% Wednesday after the software giant reported that quarterly earnings grew 23% compared with the prior year. The problem is that the peppy bottom line figure isn’t the result of a robust top line—sales increased just 3% from the prior year. Instead, like its big tech brethren, Oracle is relying on nonoperational items to boost earnings per share.

First there was the impact of a lower tax rate, which fell to 21% from 26% a year ago. Also, stock buybacks have reduced Oracle’s share count 5% over the past year. Last, a footnote to the income statement disclosed a $145 million benefit from an acquisition. Backing out the effects of financial engineering and that one-time benefit leaves Oracle’s earnings per share in the quarter at 45 cents instead of 53 cents, representing far more modest growth of 6% from the prior year.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

New and enhanced features in Oracle NoSQL Database 2.0 include:
Better Performance: enterprise-class elasticity with near linear scalability and under five millisecond latency enables users to dynamically grow a cluster as their data grows with no interruption in service. In recent performance tests, Oracle NoSQL Database 2.0 delivered more than a million YCSB operations per second on a 2.4 terabyte database on an 18-node commodity cluster setup. (1)
Automatic Rebalancing: dynamic management of compute and storage resources to maintain SLAs in response to increased demand and changing processing requirements;
Enhanced Manageability: a simple, easy to use web console to manage all aspects of deployment and monitoring, as well as document management and structured data management in one product;
New APIs: a new C API helps improve developer productivity, a new Large Object API supports efficient Large Object management, and new automatic serialization APIs simplify application developmen

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

To give you examples, we’re beating them in North America, and we’re almost shutting them out in Europe. So it’s very, very exciting. We’re also — we also are getting good wins against salesforce with our Fusion Sales automation product. Mark?
[Examples? -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

French Waterways has standardized on Informatica MDM, an integral component of the Informatica Platform to consolidate data and maximize the return on data. In time, more than 3,000 users will have access to accurate, trusted reference data for accelerated, streamlined decision-making surrounding Europe’s largest network of inland waterways.

– French Waterways is responsible for the management, operation, modernization and development of three areas of operation: Waterways (6,700 kilometers of navigable waterways and a 40,000 hectare property), Structural Services (4,000 permanent structures, such as bridges, dams and locks) and Real Estate (including, for example 1,600 lock houses.)

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Life insurer turns to Informatica to help shore up there customer experience infrastructure with improved master data management, enterprise data integration and data quality.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) today announced that fiscal 2013 Q2 total revenues were up 3% to $9.1 billion. New software licenses and cloud software subscriptions revenues were up 17% to $2.4 billion. Software license updates and product support revenues were up 7% to $4.3 billion. Hardware systems products revenues were $734 million. GAAP operating income was up 12% to $3.5 billion, and GAAP operating margin was 38%. Non-GAAP operating income was up 9% to $4.3 billion, and non-GAAP operating margin was 47%. GAAP net income was up 18% to $2.6 billion, while non-GAAP net income was up 12% to $3.1 billion. GAAP earnings per share were $0.53, up 24% compared to last year while non-GAAP earnings per share were up 18% to $0.64. GAAP operating cash flow on a trailing twelve-month basis was $13.5 billion.

Without the impact of the US dollar strengthening compared to foreign currencies, Oracle’s reported Q2 GAAP earnings per share would have been $0.01 higher at $0.54, up 26%, and Q2 non

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Sun has proven to be one of the most strategic and profitable acquisitions we have ever made. Sun technology enabled Oracle to become a leader in the highly profitable engineered system segment of the hardware business. I believe that products like Exadata and the SPARC SuperCluster will not only continue to drive improved profitability in our hardware business, by the end of this fiscal year, they will also drive growth in our hardware business.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle Corp. said it earned $2.6 billion, or 53 cents per share, in its fiscal second quarter. That compares with net income of $2.2 billion, or 43 cents per share, a year ago.

If not for charges for past acquisitions and certain other costs, Oracle said it would have earned 64 cents per share. On that basis, Oracle topped the average earnings estimate of 61 cents per share among analysts surveyed by FactSet.

Revenue increased 3 percent from last year to $9.1 billion — about $900 million more than analysts had projected.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Others see troubling signs for Oracle’s business, however.

In a recent report. Jefferies analyst Ross MacMillan noted that while Oracle’s database business “is doing OK,” he hears some of Oracle’s potential customers may be looking elsewhere for less-expensive alternatives.

In another report, tech analyst Rob Enderle said some businesses may be lured away from Oracle by EMC and IBM, which have been introducing products “to displace both Oracle hardware and software.”

Before Oracle reported its earnings, it stock price rose 56 cents, or nearly 2 percent, to close at $32.88 in regular trading. Immediately following the announcement, it went up another 32 cents in after-hours trades to $33.20.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Buckle up, CIOs, because money is flowing again in enterprise, with 20-something CEOs soon to be pounding at your door, trying to get you to try the cloud product that will “revolutionize your enterprise.” The other half, as we shall see, will try to bypass you entirely.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Check out how SaaS growth stacks up against traditional software companies, IT distribution companies and IT service specialists in the chart below.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Based on surveys for corporate technology spending plans for next year, Murphy now believes Informatica’s business has stabilized and suspects the company’s revenue could grow slightly faster than investors’ now-subdued expectations. The average forecast among analysts polled by FactSet currently calls for Informatica’s 2013 revenue to increase by 9 percent to $867 million.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Check out the infographic below for all the latest (and exciting) stats about how women are making strides in the technology field—and why we need to make sure this trend keeps on going.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Creating customer satisfaction involves a complex chain that includes product design, manufacturing, marketing, selling, and service. In this case, three parts of the chain broke down, creating a highly negative customer experience.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

By providing effective management of customer information, Empire Life is better positioned to deliver on its focus to become a customer-centric organization that is able to work with its distribution partners to deliver value-added products and services to customers throughout their life stages.
The various components of the Informatica Platform will enable Empire Life to increase the value of its data by ensuring that the information available to its hundreds of business users is:

Holistic and timely – Informatica PowerCenter Advanced Edition for enterprise data integration is being implemented to integrate data across Empire Life back-office systems, CRM systems, call center technologies and collaborative applications. PowerCenter also delivers data at virtually any speed, from real-time to batch, to drive knowledge-based product and marketing decisions and customer interactions.
Authoritative – Informatica MDM (Master Data Management) for multi-domain master data managemen

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

It’s no secret a lot of people have been downloading Google Maps for iOS since the software came out last week, and today Google released the full numbers.

In its first two days on the App Store, the software was downloaded more than 10 million times, Jeff Huber, Google’s senior vice president of Commerce & Local, wrote in a post on Google+ this morning.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Where IT Spending Increases Will Go
• Applications (49%)
• Infrastructure (47%)
• Outsourcing (32%)

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Fast PaaS is an important part of Dell’s cloud story. It fits with the company’s various acquisitions, such as Clarity, as well as homegrown projects like Project Sputnik:

Clarity offers a container for integrated developer environments (IDE). An old-school legacy app can be placed in Clarity and delivered in a container to Fast PaaS. Dell has a reseller relationship with Salesforce.com so the old-shoool software becomes a new world SaaS.
Project Sputniok is the Liniux laptop for developers that Dell created with the help of the developer community. It can be configured directly to the PaaS so developers can use it easily with the other profiles they create. Ironically, it is the inverse of the solution strategy. The VM gets all dressed up and the laptop is the blank slate.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Google Inc. is poised to offer voluntary concessions that will end a 20-month U.S. antitrust probe of its business practices without any enforcement action being taken, two people familiar with the matter said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

If your kid can score a job at Salesforce.com, tell her/him to take it – by all accounts it’s a great place to work; and if the company’s larger-than-life CEO Marc Benioff (he stands 6-foot-5 and weighs in at about 300 pounds, we’ve read) invites you to a party, do go – it’ll probably be a humdinger. As is this stock chart, with Salesforce.com shares up 55% YTD.

Oh, and this: isn’t it sweet the way American companies (Salesforce.com among them) love to talk about non-GAAP results? Fish that got away. Putts that rimmed out. Girls we almost dated in college. It’s fun imagining what might have been. And if you can get your compensation aligned with non-GAAP results, stripping out the stuff that makes business so damned hard these days, as Benioff has in part, well, that’s really great.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The actual archival feature works a lot like Facebook’s, in that you first have to submit a request to Twitter for your entire archive. Twitter processes all of your tweets on its side and emails you a download link when your archive is ready. Download it, and you’ll get a handy little HTML file of all of the tweets you’ve ever made, organized in an easily accessible calendar format.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Unavailability of management, auxiliary or administration services, including administration tools,
reporting services, utilities, or other services supporting core transaction processing.

[So, if reporting is down, or you can’t administer the environment, that doesn’t count … -DBM]

Due to potential adverse impact on service performance and availability, Customer may not use its own
monitoring or testing tools…to directly or indirectly seek to measure the availability, performance, or security of any application or feature of or service component within the services or environment.

[So, if Oracle says it, you can’t challenge it … -DBM]

The scheduled service period for core system maintenance requiring service interruption is on the 1 and 3
Friday of the month and will be scheduled by Oracle between 21:00-06:00 data center local time.

[So, Oracle can take the entire system down for 9 hours twice per month and that doesn’t even count as one second of down time … -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“The new leadership has now been in place longer than my 11-month tenure. But it’s clear that HP still is in search of the right path forward.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Clearly, Apotheker doesn’t like getting all the blame for the deal. Lane was certainly at the table, and lent his support for it. And, for that matter, so was Whitman.

Consider yourself reminded.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

But customers should be mindful of other policies, such as one that allows Oracle to turn off access to accounts in the event of a dispute or account violation. “Customers may want to get clarity on the type of incidents that would result in a temporary turn-off of service,” Wang said. “Unlike on-premises software, this is a potential concern, so the process and triggers should be carefully outlined.”

But another analyst took a more critical view of Oracle’s cloud policies.

Oracle’s pledge of 99.5 percent availability “sounds pretty good, until you understand that it is only measured against planned availability,” said analyst Frank Scavo, president of IT consulting firm Strativa. Oracle grants itself a number of exceptions with respect to “unplanned downtime,” some of which seem overly generous, Scavo noted.

For example, one gives Oracle an exception in the event of the “unavailability of management, auxiliary or administration services, including administration tools, reporting se

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Prominent futurist and author Ray Kurzweil has accepted a position as director of engineering at Google, where he plans to work on technology developments in language processing, machine learning, and other areas.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Mark Penn made a name for himself in Washington by bulldozing enemies of the Clintons. Now he spends his days trying to do the same to Google, on behalf of its archrival Microsoft.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“For the same compelling reasons that the court sealed this evidence for purposes of trial, it would be consistent and appropriate to take the same approach in connection with the parties’ post-trial submissions,” the two companies argued in the court filing.

The judge has so far been understanding of the companies’ desire to keep private details of their patent royalties and future plans, although that has perplexed some spectators who believe trials in public courts should be fully open to the public.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP launched the Social Sabbatical program, a corporate social responsibility effort through which high-potential employees spend three weeks embedded with entrepreneurial companies in Brazil, India and South Africa helping them solve business challenges.

The program was created to give employees leadership opportunities while making a tangible social impact, says Brittany Lothe, SAP’s head of corporate social responsibility. But it also created a unique group of public ambassadors for the SAP brand.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

RBC Capital Markets, which on Thursday initiated coverage of three firms in those fields — Teradata (TDC), Informatica (INFA) and Tibco Software (TIBX) — with outperform ratings.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The long calls are looking for INFA to gain roughly 15 percent by mid-March. Traders could sell those contracts earlier if their premiums gain with a rally before then, but the calls will expire worthless if the shares don’t move

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Why the dour outlook? Milunovich cited a few reasons.

Supply chain checks show that the manufacturing rate for the iPhone is dropping to 25 million units for the March quarter. The iPhone 5 is just now starting to sell in China, but UBS’s Chinese sources don’t think it will sell as well as the iPhone 4S.

The lower-priced iPad Mini looks to be cannibalizing sales of the larger and more expensive iPad.

And finally, the analyst believes his previous estimates were too aggressive in light of the lackluster economy in Europe and rougher competition from other smartphones.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

U.S. and dozens of other attendees refused to sign it due to the inclusion of Internet-related provisions.

As reported by the AFP, 89 countries signed the treaty, while 55 – including the U.S. – declined.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

When Windows was first created 25 years ago, the assumptions about the world and what computing could do and how people were going to use it were completely different. It was at a desk, with a monitor. Before Windows 8 the goal was to launch into a window, and then you put that window away and you got another one. But with Windows 8, all the different things that you might want to do are there at a glance with the Live Tiles. Instead of having to find many little rocks to look underneath, you see a kind of dashboard of everything that’s going on and everything you care about all at once. It puts you closer to what you’re trying to get done.

Windows 8 is clearly designed with touch in mind, and many new Windows 8 PCs have touch screens. Why is touch so important?

It’s a very natural way to interact. If you get a laptop with a touch screen, your brain clicks in and you just start touching what makes it faster for you. You’ll use the mouse and keyboard, but even on the regular desktop y

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Instead of having to find many little rocks to look underneath, you see a kind of dashboard of everything that’s going on and everything you care about all at once,” Larson-Green said. “It puts you closer to what you’re trying to get done.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Who gets your vote as best tech CEO of 2012?. Don’t like the nominees? Then feel free to write in your favorite.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Diluted earnings per share were $0.44 on a GAAP-basis, and $0.61 on a non-GAAP basis.
Operating income was $307.8 million and net income was $222.3 million on a GAAP basis. Operating income was $414.7 million and net income was $307.9 million on a non-GAAP basis.
Cash flow from operations was $473.7 million.
Deferred revenue grew by $59.3 million to a record $619.6 million.
Adobe added approximately 10,000 Creative Cloud subscriptions per week during the quarter, versus the addition of 8,000 subscriptions per week in the third quarter.
In Document Services, which includes the Adobe Acrobat® product family, Adobe also achieved record revenue of $210.2 million during the quarter.
Adobe Marketing Cloud achieved record quarterly revenue of $220.4 million, which represents 32 percent year-over-year growth.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Cash is more than king. Cash is blood. Every single dollar matters — so spend your money wisely.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“A CEO told me that SAP has the god-given right to do financials in the cloud -and this is due the fact that we have the DNA to understand how finance works and so taking this forward with Financials OnDemand based on HANA is a natural process for us,” he sys.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SuccessFactors, which is owned by SAP, moved into the building this week and will eventually have 440 employees deployed in the space. Roy Ng, vice president of business operations for SuccessFactors, said the new headquarters represented an “opportunity to embrace all that SAP and SuccessFactors stands for and build a truly unique space that will provide a home for collaboration, interactivity and cloud innovation.”

The new space, designed by AI and built out by Myers Development, is “a place for our global employees and customers to visit and feel at home and will lay down new roots for future acceleration.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle wants to make money now.

And it is making money now. Despite all the talk (including my own) about Oracle being doomed, dooo-o-o-omed, in the cloud era, the company’s results remain strong. The stock is up almost 35% this year, and then there’s the 18 cent/share dividend, which will go nowhere but up. Despite having the boat anchor of the old Sun Microsystems hardware business stuck to it, and despite being unable to monetize that company’s open source software, Oracle is still bringing one dollar in four to the bottom line, and year-over-year revenues are fairly stable.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In the last week, Yahoo has redone its powerful Yahoo Mail, refreshed its Flickr photo-sharing service and is also set to release a spanking new homepage design.

It’s part of a series of changes made since new CEO Marissa Mayer arrived this summer from Google, including detailed employee performance reviews, free food, new smartphones and a hunt for innovative mobile properties to scoop up to improve Yahoo’s creaky Silicon Valley reputation.

Now, according to sources close to the situation, that rejiggering will extend to Yahoo’s board too, with an effort to add more Internet savvy members as directors.

That’s actually be an aim for a while, including a board appointment for longtime entrepreneur Max Levchin, which sources said will occur soon.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Google Maps appeared on Apple’s app store late Wednesday, less than four weeks after The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was putting the finishing touches on the app for Apple devices and was preparing to submit it to Apple for approval.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“ITR should be a high-level document, and the scope of treaty does not extend to the Internet.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Thursday when a former private investigator was sentenced to three months in prison for his role in the pretexting scheme.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Since it was founded, Tableau Software has raised $15 million from New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm where Sandell is also a general partner. So far, it has used about $1.5 million of that funding and has had positive cash flow for three years, according to a spokeswoman for Tableau Software.

“It’s a remarkable story, it’s a rare company,” Sandell said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

That translates to an average wage increase of less than 0.5% a year. In real terms, IT wages overall have gone up by $1.97 an hour in just over 10 years, according to the EPI. The Washington-based think tank gathered data from the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of households conducted by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Data integration software provider Informatica has introduced the new release of its cloud-based integration and data quality application, Informatica Cloud Winter 2013.

Powered by integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), the new release is claimed to deliver enhanced end-user cloud integration features that extend Informatica Cloud functionality.

Informatica Cloud Winter 2013 will also advance in cloud master data management (MDM), address validation, deliver cloud integration platform enhancements, offer expanded availability of Cloud Connectors and Cloud Integration Templates on the Informatica Marketplace.

The new release introduces an upgraded cloud integration interface to enhance end-user productivity and enable users to search for relevant cloud integration tasks from activity logs and execute new task flows from anywhere within the cloud integration service, the company said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Couchbase 2.0, which adds document database capability to the leading key-value pair database.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The Microsoft report projects a labor shortage over the next eight years by incorrectly assuming that only individuals with a bachelor’s degree in computer science can fill jobs in computer-related occupations. Data analyzed for this memorandum as well as other studies show that less than one-fourth to less than one-half of workers in computing occupations have a computer science degree.

The report and Microsoft officials say a labor shortage already exists in computer-related occupations, citing as evidence the fact that the present unemployment rate of workers in those occupations (3.4 percent) is less than the 4 percent unemployment rate that prevails when the national economy is at full employment (generally understood as a 4 to 5 percent unemployment rate). But Microsoft is misleading when it uses the 4 percent full-employment unemployment rate for all workers as the point of reference. Data analyses suggest that for workers in computer-related occupations—and especially

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Asked if Microsoft’s best days were behind it, he said new products such as the Windows 8 operating system showed promise. “They’re fighting like hell,” he said. “They have tons of cash, they have really good management.”

Andreessen, who is on the boards of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Facebook, said little about those companies, citing his position as a director.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

IT salaries are (surprise!) stagnant, increasing by just under $2 an hour over 10 years, Microsoft is lobbying hard for more H-1B visas, and now IBM, one of the industry’s largest employers, is taking millions of dollars out of the pockets of its employees by manipulating the schedule of 401(k) contributions.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle fails to acknowledge or admit that SAP HANA is a completely new design as opposed to a bolt-on approach. With SAP HANA, data is completely managed and accessed in RAM consequently doing away with the requirement of MOLAP, multiple indexes and other tuning features that Oracle prides itself on.

Furthermore, despite what Oracle may claim, SAP HANA does indeed handle both unstructured and structured data, as well as utilise parallel queries for scaling out across server nodes. Oracle presumably is trying to prevent the market from realising that the TimesTen with Exalytics package still can’t scale out beyond the 1TB RAM limit, unlike SAP HANA where each container can store up to 500TB of data all executable at high speed.

With an aggressive TCO and ROI model compared to a traditional Oracle deployment, SAP HANA also proves a lot more cost effective. With pricing based on an incremental of 64GB RAM and the total amount of data held in memory, licences are fully inclusive of produ

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

For this reason, ZDNet and I have changed the title of this blog to Beyond IT Failures, although, in reality, the content shift happened long ago. Read through past articles on this blog and you will see extensive discussion of the organizational dynamics that underlie success and failure. Recent posts included CIO leadership matters, cloud, and other topics designed to help you achieve success. It’s an exciting time to talk about IT and the enterprise, and the expanded blog focus will make this column relevant, useful, and fresh.

I have also started a new website, called mkrigsman.com. Please take a look and sign up for the newsletter.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Larry Ellison gets cloud religion…
SAP admits need for ‘cloud DNA’…
SaaS moves into the back office…
Mobile becomes a must-have…
Oracle’s database dominance at risk?…
Cloud integration market matures…
ERP goes social…

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

ERP vendors are going all-in with the cloud. Many ERP vendors debuted product or fleshed out their strategies for software-as-a-service (SaaS) ERP in 2012, and further developments are set for 2013. While the focus this year has been on SaaS ERP — and often how a SaaS offering can live in hybrid harmony with its older sibling, on-premises ERP — some vendors also revealed their platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) strategies. When it comes to PaaS, ERP vendors are opening up their own development platform and/or partnering with vendors like Amazon.com and Microsoft. Cloud-focused acquisitions also continued in 2012, notably SAP’s purchase of procurement rival Ariba to help fill out the suppliers pillar of its four-pillar app cloud — the other three pillars being people (HR), money (financials), and customers (CRM).

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle isn’t alone in pursuing smart meter analytics. IBM and SAP both have initiatives underway, and both can point to customers with deployments in place. IBM worked with Washington D.C.’s water utility as part of its Smarter Cities initiative, and it’s working with Texas utility Oncor as part of its Smarter Utilities program. SAP is using its Hana database technology at U.K.-based gas and electric utility Centrica.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Very cool! -DBM]

What can SAP Screen Personas do for you?

Improve business user productivity by providing only the essential screen elements and data to complete business transactions faster and more accurately through fewer data entry fields.
Increase user satisfaction by automating repetitive tasks and simplifying complex screens through pre-filled fields and pull-down menus.
Reduce the cost of personalization by eliminating the need for ABAP programmers or scripting experts.
Decrease training time for SAP users.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“The chatter about enterprise startups is more a function of the fact that consumer startups look less appealing [to investors] more than anything else,” said CB Insights’ CEO Anand Sanwal. ”Folk are saying now that enterprise is the place they should be playing.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The diificultyof SAP to succinctly express its cloud strategy has been depicted by influencers, customers and now recently SAP itself. I’ve also emphasized that SAP’s cloud-related messaging must be improved.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Richard Campione has joined its board of directors, effective November 29, 2012. A 30-year technology industry veteran, Campione has held senior executive titles at C3, Oracle, SAP and Siebel Systems and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on cloud computing.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The chart shows consumer computing devices, rather than total computing devices — which includes both consumer and commercial. That’s why Microsoft is shown is having 93 percent in 2000 in the chart, as opposed to 97 percent.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Microsoft’s total market share for computers including tablets and smartphones has plummeted from 97% to 20%, and by the end of this year its market share will be less than half of Google’s, and will trail Apple’s. So says Goldman Sachs in a recent report.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Mr Schmidt, 57, was offered the job of Treasury or Commerce Secretary or a new “Secretary of Business” slot, according to the Washington Examiner.

An anonymous strategist for the Democrats told the newspaper: “Nobody’s better positioned for a Cabinet job, if he wants one.”

Mr Schmidt’s rebuttal was swift, however, as he told the Wall Street Journal in an interview yesterday: “I said last time and I’ve said again that Google is my home. I have no interest in working for the federal government”.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

First and foremost, you’re dumping your data onto USB drives, when are then dropped off at UPS. No kidding — it’s too much data to upload.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“It was shopped to us as well,” he said. But he added that Dell did not give it much consideration. “Not at that price. That was an overwhelmingly obvious conclusion that any reasonable person could draw.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In remarks made at the time by Grover Dunn, the Air Force director of transformation, we can see just how unrealistic the project was: “We’ve never tried to change all the processes, tools and languages of all 250,000 people in our business at once, and that’s essentially what we’re about to do.”

Signs that such comprehensive change could not, in fact, be done “at once” were visible last spring…“I am personally appalled at the limited capabilities that program has produced relative to that amount of investment.”

With the cancellation of the system last month, a spokeswoman said that the Air Force would continue to rely on its legacy logistics systems, some of which have been in use since the 1970s.

THE Defense Department says that the way the system was conceived was flawed. “We started with a Big Bang approach and put every possible requirement into the program, which made it very large and very complex,” says Elizabeth McGrath, the department’s deputy chief management officer.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The increase in Google’s revenues routed to Bermuda, disclosed in a Nov. 21 filing by a subsidiary in the Netherlands, could fuel the outrage spreading across Europe and in the U.S. over corporate tax dodging. Governments in France, the U.K., Italy and Australia are probing Google’s tax avoidance as they seek to boost revenue during economic doldrums.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The software initiative, called the Expeditionary Combat Support System, was supposed to manage logistics using software from Oracle. In 2006, the Air Force announced that it had awarded a $628 million contract to the Computer Sciences Corporation to serve as lead system integrator; its job would be to “configure, deploy and conduct training and change management activities” before the launch.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Many computer-related patent claims just describe an abstract idea at a high level of generality and say to perform it on a computer or over the Internet. Such bare-bones claims grant exclusive rights over the abstract idea itself, with no limit on how the idea is implemented. Granting patent protection for such claims would impair, not promote, innovation by conferring exclusive rights on those who have not meaningfully innovated, and thereby penalizing those that do later innovate by blocking or taxing their applications of the abstract idea.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The following pair of quotes is pulled directly from the promotional material on the website of just one prolific patent troll:

“$2 Billion+ cumulative licensing revenue”

“70,000 IP assets acquired and nearly 40,000 in active monetisation programmes”

In fact it is not just legal, patent trolling is an industry on a colossal scale. According to research recently published by Boston University School of Law, last year patent trolls won a cool $29 Billion. One of the most worrying findings of research in to patent trolls is that the mere threat of a suit is enough to put the frighteners on and make creators pay up:

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Just because you take an abstract idea and say you do it “on a computer” or “over the Internet” doesn’t mean you deserve a patent, according to an amicus brief filed on Friday by Google, Facebook and six other tech companies. It asks the courts to reject lawsuits based on patents for vague concepts instead of specific applications because they rack up costs and retard innovation.

The amicus curiae brief lets parties outside of a case volunteer information to help a court make a decision. Also cosigned by Zynga, Dell, Intuit, Homeaway, Rackspace, and Red Hat, this brief communicates information to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit regarding the case CLS vs. Alice. CLS claims that Alice’s patents for the vague idea of financial intermediation implemented with a computer shouldn’t be valid. However, the courts initially ruled that Alice’s patents were eligible and could be used to counter-sue CLS for infringement.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

This website is maintained by Dr Mike Lynch on behalf of the former management team of Autonomy. The site provides relevant information pertaining to the accusations made by Hewlett Packard (HP) on 20 November 2012 of financial impropriety at Autonomy. The former management team of Autonomy strongly rejects the accusations made by HP.

Click here for the press release issued by HP.

This site is designed to be a public point of contact for Dr Mike Lynch and other former managers at Autonomy with the wider world. It will contain information about Autonomy and any public statements made on behalf of the former management team related to these issues.

The Autonomy team are committed to providing clear and transparent information during this process, and would like to see the issue resolved as quickly as possible.

If you have any questions please use the submission form on the Contact section.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Mike Lynch has created a website called autonomyaccounts.org, at which he disputes HP’s claims that it discovered accounting irregularities at Autonomy after it spent $11.1 billion to buy the British company.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“We remain 100 percent committed to Autonomy’s industry- leading technology and its employees,” Whitman said at a customer conference in Frankfurt today. Autonomy’s technology is “incredible” and will help to spur growth at Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard, she said, adding that the unit is essential to the company’s progress.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Prices start at $0.04 per hour with a service level agreement (SLA) of at least 99.95 percent — or fewer than 30 minutes downtime per month. AWS offers an SLA of 99.95 percent per year but requires very specific configurations to meet its bar for reimbursement. Gartner analyst Lydia Leong has said that Amazon’s SLAs are “narrowly defined” and don’t cover Elastic Block Storage (EBS), which most customers use.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

HP’s differentiation from the start has been a relentless focus on enterprise customers — as opposed to AWS’ passive come-one, come-all marketing — with an accent on “converged” or “hybrid” offerings that bridge the private and public cloud. Zorawar “Biri” Singh, senior vice president and general manager of HP Converged Cloud and Cloud Services, told InfoWorld that the general availability of HP Cloud Compute “now allows enterprises to start pulling together … very robust workloads in full production lifecycles” on HP’s IaaS cloud.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

HP’s added new features to its HP CloudSystem, which allows HP solution providers to build and manage cloud, and extended existing programs.

For its Cloud Maps program, HP increased the number of templates by 30 percent, adding more than 200 templates to its catalogue with which partners can add programs such as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint to their cloud services offerings for customers.

HP CloudSystem is also offering service lifecycle management as well as support for KVM virtual machines and bursting capability, or the ability to tap the full computing capacity of service providers.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Amazon Web Services, which Gartner recently named a market-leader in infrastructure as a service cloud computing, has the “dubious status of ‘worst SLA (service level agreement) of any major cloud provider’” analyst Lydia Leong blogged today, but HP’s newly available public cloud service could be even worse

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The most significant difference between the SLAs is that the HP’s SLA is intended to cover a single-instance failure, where you can’t replace that single instance; AWS requires that all of your instances in at least two AZs be unavailable. HP requires that you try to re-launch that instance in a different AZ, but a failure of that launch attempt in any of the other AZs in the region will be considered downtime. You do not need to be running in two AZs all the time in order to get the SLA; for the purposes of the SLA clause requiring two AZs, the launch attempt into a second AZ counts.

HP begins counting downtime when, post-instance-failure, you make the launch API call that is destined to fail — downtime begins to accrue 6 minutes after you make that unsuccessful API call. (To be clear, the clock starts when you issue the API call, not when the call has actually failed, from what I understand.) When the downtime clock stops is unclear, though — it stops when the customer has managed t

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the poster-child for cloud IaaS, but the AWS SLA also has the dubious status of “worst SLA of any major cloud IaaS provider”. (It’s notable that, in several major outages, AWS did voluntary givebacks — for some outages, there were no applicable SLAs.)

HP has just launched its OpenStack-based Public Cloud Compute into general availability. HP’s SLA is unfortunately arguably even worse.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

While there are plenty of platforms available for managing APIs, the management of data transfers across applications is overly complex. Start to scale that process across hundreds of applications and it soon balloons beyond the scope of what the average application development team can cope with. Add in the fact that no one knows when they might be asked to integrate one application with another and it becomes pretty apparent that a more systematic approach to the problem is required.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Today we are announcing that it has been determined that the combined company headquarters will be in Scottsdale,” JDA Software said in an SEC filing. “While the RedPrairie Alpharetta office will no longer be a headquarters location, the merger will not impact the company’s commitment to maintaining a strong corporate presence and community involvement in the Atlanta area, as well as in the locations of the other main RedPrairie and JDA offices.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Heroku is adding a number of new aspects to version 2.0 of the marketplace:

Easier Self-Service: A new interface gives developers a simpler way to manage their add-ons. By packaging the experience, Heroku gives developers some flexibility to test and market the apps.

Templates: A new set of templates for making new documentation, embedding it into sales pages, creating branding, visibility into analytics, etc.

Billing: All aspects of billing are taken care of by Heroku. This includes failed payments, declined cards, and all the pitfalls and complexities that go with managing transactions.

Support: Developers get first-level support to help with integration issues. Developers also get help selling the add-ons with the integrated platform.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The Heroku Add-Ons Program aims to helps cloud service providers with key business needs, including full lifecycle billing, full integration Relevant Products/Services with customer applications, single sign-on customer log-in, and an integrated end-user support experience. What’s more, a Heroku sales team sells the platform and add-ons. The second iteration of Heroku Add-Ons Marketplace offers an updated developer-facing marketplace and a new service provider management Relevant Products/Services experience.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

That’s the conclusion of a report released Friday by Daniel Ives, an analyst for FBR Capital Markets. Ives also reiterated his outperform rating on Salesforce, the leading provider of customer relationship management software.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Unilever is using HANA in every area of its business. It runs 27TB regional databases and uses 30GB in-memory HANA systems in each region.

The in-memory database processes 30,000 transactions per minute. In a proof-of-concept application, HANA enabled Unilever to reduce the time it takes to process 200 million records from 440 seconds to just 30 seconds, allowing the company to determine the cost of how much a product costs using pricing information for raw materials.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Enterprise software has always been based on the premise that it has value to a customer. The value can be quantified and there is a clear return on investment. Customers have a need that the software addresses. They implement it on-premises or in the cloud, train people to use it, maintain and upgrade it. It then becomes an indispensable part of an organization’s operations. Great value but not sexy.

Compare that to consumer-oriented software, where downloads/sales are based on fads, impulse, emotion, possibilities and intangibles. Consumers tend to be fickle, using a game or other apps for a while, and then move on to the next hot one.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

There was a time when enterprise computing was almost exclusively dominated by Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco. It was a time when on-premise, Windows-based applications were the de facto standard and there was no alternative. The enterprise was so entrenched that challenging the status quo was viewed as suicidal and very stupid. So hardened was the thinking that most innovation in the enterprise was relegated to mere feature extensions of existing solutions.

Fast-forward to today and the world of enterprise computing has done a 180. Traditional IT is being blown to bits as cloud infrastructure, Software-as-a-Service and mobile computing become the new standards. We are experiencing innovation and usage as never seen before. It is truly a renaissance of massive scale. Hundreds of billions of dollars are up for grabs as buyers shift to new architectures and away from old, as new users and new markets embrace the availability and ease by which they can consume technology.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In its first quarterly report since becoming a publicly traded company, Workday had a loss excluding some items of 39 cents a share, the company said in a statement yesterday. Analysts predicted a loss of 49 cents, the average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Sales in the quarter ended Oct. 31 doubled to $72.6 million, compared with projections for $64 million.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Now, according to two sources, Apple and Google’s groups have hammered out their differences and the two consortia have joined together to share costs and put in a combined bid of around $800m.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

For Stallman, however, the core issue is not advertising, although that’s certainly unwelcome. The core issue is the exchange of personal user information … even though Canonical does not send any personal information to Amazon, running the Amazon search query on its own servers based on information that it retains.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

This should be troubling for Microsoft, which is in a precarious position with its new operating system and lackluster tablet sales. Businesses are the backbone of Microsoft’s software empire – without them, it would be in serious trouble.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

With focus we’ll be able to do even more for our business customers. We’re excited about the opportunity to push Google Apps further so our customers can do what matters most to them–whether that’s scooping ice cream, changing the face of healthcare or contributing to lifelong learning.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Over the past year Google generated around $1 billion from the sale of Google Apps and separate mapping software to businesses and governments, said people familiar with the matter. Google said more than five million businesses use Google Apps, though the vast majority have fewer than 10 users and thus use the free version. In total, Google has said more than 40 million people use the free and paid versions of Google Apps…
Google has made other moves to generate revenue from businesses that used its services for free. Last year, Google began charging businesses such as mobile app makers that access Google Maps more than 25,000 times per day. This year, Google began charging retailers seeking to be included in its Google Shopping service.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

IBM SmartCloud Docs includes Web-based apps for the creation, editing, and sharing of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. The suite is available for free as part of Big Blue’s SmartCloud Engage Advanced business networking and collaboration service.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

That technology, from Salesforce.com, tracked the 5.7 million messages– as many as 80,000 per day—received by email, phone and through the campaign’s website. To sort through the messages and get questions routed to the right staffer in the campaign’s sprawling organization, the system automatically created tags from words in the inquiries—like “polling” or “contribution,” said Vivek Kundra, executive vice president for emerging markets at Saleforce.com. Kundra previously served as the first CIO of the federal government, from 2009 to 2011.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP offers six business apps for Windows 8 for use on devices of various form factors focused on enterprise functions such as training, recruiting and sales. All six of these mobile apps are planned to be available for download in both the Windows Store and SAP Store. These mobile apps include:

SAP WorkDeck, developed first for Windows 8, is a new persona-centric app that offers contextual integration of various information sources and processes into a role-based view. SAP WorkDeck allows employees to initiate new requests, oversee upcoming events and monitor the progress, as well as enables managers to react and process workflows on-the-go, such as travel, leave and purchasing requests.
SAP Manager Insight…
SAP Learning Assistant…
SAP Interview Assistant…
SAP Customer Financial Fact Sheet…
SAP GRC Policy Survey

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

$65 million in a new funding round led by Accel Partners, with support from Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel, and Meritech Capital Partners. The investment will fund global sales growth and fuel continued development of its platform for Big Data in support of its growing enterprise customer base. The company will be expanding its international presence with the opening of a European headquarters in the UK, in the first quarter of 2013.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The biggest and best known company in the Hadoop world is Cloudera. Started in 2008 by a trio of engineers from Facebook, Google and Yahoo (Jeff Hammerbacher, Christophe Bisciglia and Amr Awadallah) plus CEO Mike Olson, a former Oracle exec, it has in four years gone from the start-up that few really understood to the company you have to talk to if you want to stand a chance wrestling your data challenges to the ground.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Kuelps joins UBS from SAP, the global leader in business software, where he has been Head of Global Communications for the past two years. Prior to SAP, Kuelps spent 11 years at Allianz SE, a leading international financial services company, where he last served as Head of Communications for Allianz of America. Previous roles included Chief Operating Officer of Allianz Life Insurance Malaysia as well as department head and financial spokesperson at Allianz Group Communications in Munich. Before joining Allianz, Kuelps was Head of Communications at the German-American Chamber of Commerce in New York. He holds a German law degree and a Bachelor of Arts from Middlebury College in the US.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Changing licensing is always a way vendors deal with a revenue problem.”

Microsoft raised only the price of its user CALs, and left the device CALs alone. Experts like Ullman saw the change as a bid to cash in on the BYOD (bring your own device) movement to accommodate workers who use three or four devices to do their jobs. It’s no coincidence, they said, that the increased revenue will come from the dramatic shift toward mobile.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Not only are those prices a bit higher than for comparable versions of Office 2010, but they also cover just one installation; Home and Student 2010 allowed three, and previously Microsoft discounted multiple-license purchases of other editions.

If you need Office on only a single PC, an Office 365 subscription quickly costs more after a year or so. On the other hand, if you use Office on multiple PCs, you’ll find that Office 365 subscriptions—which include five Office 2013 installations and start at $100 a year—are cheaper over several years. The $150 Office 365 Small Business Premium looks like the best deal for small companies. You’ll have to do the math for your situation.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The company says that other than poor distribution, other factors significantly affecting the ability of Microsoft to sell the surface RT tablet include a high starting price of $499 and mixed reviews. The distribution system for the tablet doesn’t have a strong retail presence.

AllThingsD reports that there are only 31 Microsoft stores and 34 small holiday kiosks in the US. Microsoft’s original plan was to restrict retail sales of the tablet to its own stores, but that plan is obviously not working out. It remains to be seen if Microsoft will change its plan and allow retailers such as Best Buy and others put the tablet in their stores.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Still, it reflects pressure on companies to create even a modest number of domestic jobs as the unemployment rate hovers near 8 percent and the economy rebounds from the recession that ended in 2009.

“I don’t think we have a responsibility to create a certain kind of job,” Cook said. “But I think we do have a responsibility to create jobs.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Luna Rossa, the Italian team, contends in its formal protest to an international jury of sailing experts that Oracle Team USA sent a spy in an inflatable boat to take pictures of its 72-foot catamaran during training runs last month on the Hauraki Gulf in New Zealand.

Oracle broke an America’s Cup protocol, Luna Rossa contends, by coming too close. Oracle admits it sent a man to observe — just as its competitors sent spies to the San Francisco Bay to watch Oracle’s boat before it capsized and broke apart in October — but claims it broke no rules.

Welcome to the intrigue and gamesmanship of the America’s Cup.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

IBM plans to continue selling Kenexa’s applications and IT services on a standalone basis, while progressively bundling and integrating them with IBM enterprise social and HR software and services.

Kenexa competitors Taleo and SuccessFactors were acquired in the past year by Oracle and SAP, respectively, as larger vendors try to capitalize on strong growth for enterprise HR software.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP is looking to create internal startups that could result in $200 million in revenue within three to five years, Yotopoulos said. These businesses are meant to pursue ideas that are either adjacent to a market SAP is already in, or things that typically “in a large company go against the grain,” he added.

SAP is also hiring “the best entrepreneurs from inside and outside the company” to build teams in support of the ideas, he said. “In many cases, these people have learned the hard way on someone else’s nickel what works and what doesn’t.”

Each effort is funded much like a typical startup, beginning with a seed round followed by additional stages, with the primary difference being that SAP is the sole investor. This provides an advantage, since the entrepreneurs SAP brings in to run the startups aren’t as distracted by the need to raise funds.

Not every project makes it, according to Yotopoulos; some are killed “if the market opportunity does not manifest itself.”

About 200 rese

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Does the world really need another social network?

Microsoft thinks so. The company on Wednesday opened up registration for its new project, the aptly named Socl, to users with Microsoft and Facebook accounts. Socl launched last year but was in beta for Microsoft employees and college students until Wednesday.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

And computer makers have been hampered in introducing tablets by limits Microsoft imposed on which manufacturers got a crack at prototypes, and by delays in Intel power-management software.

The holdup is making it harder for personal-computer makers, already beleaguered by plummeting demand, to challenge Apple and Google Inc. (GOOG) during the year-end holiday shopping season. While PC variants running Windows abound, tablets built on ARM Holdings Plc (ARM) technology-based chips or low-power processors from Intel are scarce.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle is the latest of a string of companies that have moved up quarterly payouts or issued a special end-of-year payment to protect investors from potentially having to pay higher taxes on dividend income starting in January.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle’s accelerated dividend totals 18 cents per share, a payment that will come in lieu of quarterly dividends that would have been paid in 2013, the firm said in a statement.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

At around $78, shares are trading near an all-time high, prices SAP hasn’t seen since before the collapse of Internet bubble in 2000.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

As costs increase for education and child care and rents begin to rise again in some markets, single parents can be financially challenged. Structural shifts in the economy have made transition to the next job more challenging than expected those seeking employment. Moreover, most of the grantees have been unsuccessful in securing the child support they were legally awarded.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

To protect the stock price, a bank will place 10 million euros worth of the shares every month until no more are left.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Samsung’s smart TVs get their intelligence from software, and all that runs in the AWS cloud. “That architecture is not an 19th-century architecture,” Vogels said. “That architecture is a 21st-century architecture.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Andreessen also talked about his “software eats the world” thesis. In the computer industry the value has migrated from hardware to software. Software developers have therefore been applying this technology to older industries that were not technology focused, he said, citing Border’s decision in 2001 to outsource digital to Amazon and the eventual bankruptcy of the company.

[Software certainly ate HP -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

While a third of executives responding to a recent survey (32%) agree that the IT department is currently the main driver of cloud adoption, another 45% report that individual business units are ultimately responsible for cloud adoption strategies.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The 3 major business drivers for the move to the Cloud:
52%: reduced cost
41%: reduced time to market
39%: operational efficiencies

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Software from Retalix, used in more than 70,000 retail locations in more than 50 countries, will help the U.S. company expand the tools it offers corporate customers in industries such as finance, travel and hospitality, NCR said. It will also provide a mix of higher-margin software and services that can help NCR diversify beyond its roots in hardware.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Sales at $72.6 million grew 99 percent year on year, and while the net loss grew to $41.3 million versus $19.7 million a year ago, it was, at 39 cents per share, a lot better than the 67 cent loss that analysts had expected.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The percentages were impressive, but the revenue figures underscored that Workday is a small, seven-year-old company with 356 customers and a sliver of the markets it serves. Total revenue for the quarter was $72.6 million while subscription revenue was $51.6 million. Workday is also far from profitable, reporting a third-quarter operating loss of $40.9 million, up from an operating loss of $19.4 million in the same period last year. The non-GAAP net loss for the quarter was $23 million.

Operating cash flow was also negative, but Workday’s balance sheet is strong, with $797.4 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities on the books at the end of the quarter. The company raised nearly $685 million of that hoard in its highly successful October initial public offering. Workday is now pouring that money into growing the company, and it has already increased its headcount by 75% this year.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The company says it has 1,800 business customers, up from fewer than 200 in 2008.

“Our focus has been on helping companies get off of Oracle and onto Postgres,” said Ed Boyajian, EnterpriseDB’s chief executive.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Mason replied by stating that “it would be weird if the Board wasn’t discussing whether I’m the right guy for the job.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“What I can say is, we see increasing pressure from customers in terms of reducing any kind of costs,” he said. “So of course we have a higher number of discussions with customers compared to the past [regarding maintenance fees].”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The CIOs we interviewed demonstrate that IT can use innovation and new thinking to forge a high-value, strategic role in business. In higher education, the significant impact of technology demands that academic, administrative, and technical leaders cooperate as never before.

To ensure and sustain relevance, CIOs today have little choice but to reconceive their role as collaborator and innovator. The path forward consists of communication, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and relentless dedication to the customer – the hallmarks of strategic partnership.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Understand ERP software pricing complexities…
Beware of the “best practices” trap. Many ERP vendors tout their pre-configured industry solutions, suggesting that their software is designed and built for your industry. While this may be true of niche providers, larger ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics simply cannot be everything to everyone. As a result, they counter these perceived disadvantages by driving home industry “best practices” sales messaging, which has varying degrees of relevance. In most industries in which we work – especially the more complex ones such as food and beverage or aerospace and defense – these best practices are largely irrelevant, necessitating extensive reconfiguration to meet the unique needs and complexities of the individual organizations implementing them.
Realize that quarter-end discounts are overrated…

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The Informatica Cloud Winter 2013 update has a newly revamped user interface and self-service capabilities, new master data management (MDM) capabilities, and a host of new and updated cloud connectors.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“There’s nothing glamorous about keeping data clean and orderly, and there’s no sexy payoff that a lot of other things have in an enterprise,” Rogers said. “These are the types of projects that are started and get cut real quick because no one understands their impact.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Amazon Redshift is a massively parallel, fully-managed data warehouse service, designed for data sets from hundreds of gigabytes to several petabytes in size, and appropriate for an organization of any size — from a startup to a multi-national — at a price point that will take you by surprise. Amazon Redshift is fully managed, so you no longer need to worry about provisioning hardware, installation, configuration or patching of system or database software, Because your business is dependent on your data, Amazon Redshift takes care to protect it by replicating all data within the cluster as well as in S3.

Amazon Redshift won’t break the bank (or your credit card, since it is completely pay-as-you-go). We did the math and found that it would generally cost you between $19,000 and $25,000 per terabyte per year at list prices to build and run a good-sized data warehouse on your own. Amazon Redshift, all-in, will cost you less than $1,000 per terabyte per year. For that price you get all o

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

A sizable majority of respondents in all regions said they planned to increase their investments in SaaS. Only small percentages planned to cut spending on SaaS, according to the report…
Users are also increasingly weighing whether a SaaS vendor also offers PaaS (platform as a service) capabilities for extending the software and building new applications, according to Gartner. Fifty-six percent called PaaS “very important,” another 22 percent termed it a “requirement,” and 18 percent said it was “somewhat important,” the report states.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Amazon Redshift is a fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. Amazon Redshift offers you fast query performance when analyzing virtually any size data set using the same SQL-based tools and business intelligence applications you use today. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can launch a Redshift cluster, starting with a few hundred gigabytes of data and scaling to a petabyte or more, for under $1,000 per terabyte per year.

Amazon Redshift manages all the work needed to set up, operate, and scale a data warehouse cluster, from provisioning capacity to monitoring and backing up the cluster, to applying patches and upgrades. Scaling a cluster to improve performance or increase capacity is simple and incurs no downtime. The service continuously monitors the health of the cluster and automatically replaces any component, if needed. By automating these labor-intensive tasks, Amazon Redshift enables you to spend your time focusin

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

From an enterprise viewpoint this means that data quality should be a central part of your MDM initiative, and you need to consider it when evaluating software and planning your project. You need to probe suppliers on what data quality functionality they provide, how well integrated it is, and how well it will work on your particular data.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

RedShift has been tested on Amazon. Amazon took 2 billion rows of data and ran on Redshift.
Two 16 TB nodes on RedShift cost $3.65 an hour or $32,000 and got faster queries for a tenth of the cost.
Redshift will work with all the current business intelligence tools.
Pricing is 85 cents an hour for 2TB nodes. Annual deals and reserved instances are cheaper.
Companies pay $19,000 to $25,000 a year per TB.
Limited preview starts today with full launch in 2013.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Nokia has filed documents in courts in the United States, the U.K. and Canada asking them to bar Research In Motion from selling BlackBerry devices in those countries until RIM agrees to a new licensing agreement for Nokia-owned patents.

The patents have to do with the 802.11 wireless LAN standard.

“RIM is not entitled to manufacture or sell products compatible with the WLAN standard without first agreeing with Nokia on the royalty to be paid for its manufacture and/or sale of subscriber terminals compatible with such standards,” Nokia said in its filing, according to the IDG News Service, which reported Nov. 28 that it had obtained a copy of the filing.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Microsoft has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses. Tami Reller shared this news with industry and financial analysts, investors and media today at the Credit Suisse 2012 Annual Technology Conference. Windows 8 is outpacing Windows 7 in terms of upgrades. We built Windows 8 to work great on existing Windows 7 PCs. And we also set out to make upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8 super easy.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Full year fiscal 2012 GAAP loss per share of $6.41
Full year fiscal 2012 net revenue of $120.4 billion, down 5% from the prior-year period and down 4% when adjusted for the effects of currency…
Fourth quarter GAAP loss per share of $3.49
Fourth quarter net revenue of $30.0 billion, down 7% from the prior-year period and down 4% when adjusted for the effects of currency
Cash flow from operations of $4.1 billion, up 69% from the prior-year period
Returned $384 million in cash to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases
Fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2012 results include a non-cash goodwill and intangible asset impairment charge of $8.8 billion relating to the Autonomy business within the Software segment

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

HP has initiated an intense internal investigation into a series of accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations that occurred prior to HP’s acquisition of Autonomy. We believe we have uncovered extensive evidence of a willful effort on behalf of certain former Autonomy employees to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company in order to mislead investors and potential buyers…
While Dr. Lynch is eager for a debate, we believe the legal process is the correct method in which to bring out the facts and take action on behalf of our shareholders. In that setting, we look forward to hearing Dr. Lynch and other former Autonomy employees answer questions under penalty of perjury.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Part of the problem is that even if Autonomy had knocked it out of the park, instead of fouling out, it never would have turned HP around. Not even close. The fact that it’s now another big HP deal gone bad just adds to the sense that all we can do is watch a Greek tragedy unfolding on stage before our eyes.

Whitman’s blame problem starts with the fact that the Autonomy deal was on the table even before Apotheker showed up, and became a component in the strategic planning for the company pretty much from day one of Apotheker’s short reign. Considering the board’s role during the interregnum between Mark Hurd’s departure and Apotheker’s appointment, the board, of which Whitman was a member, had to have been considering, if not vetting, the Autonomy deal during that period. So rather than blame Apotheker, Whitman has only to look to the HP board – of which she was a member – to find where the blame game starts, and stops.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Infor’s strategy has been consistent throughout this period, and more importantly, it is now inarguable that Infor is a single, integrated ERP vendor and not a group of vendors tied together by a single holding company. Furthermore, the core elements of the “new Infor” appear to be working.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

On November 21, 2012, Versant entered into an Agreement and Plan of Merger (the “Actian Merger Agreement”) with Actian Corporation, a Delaware corporation (“Actian”) and Actian Sub I, Inc. a California corporation that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Actian (“Merger Sub”). The Actian Merger Agreement provides for the merger of Merger Sub with and into Versant (the “Merger”), with Versant continuing as the surviving corporation of the Merger and becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Actian upon consummation of the Merger. The Actian Merger Agreement was unanimously approved by the Board.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Versant and Actian have complementary businesses,” said Bernhard Woebker, Versant’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “We believe we can leverage our combined strength in managing complex information in environments that demand high performance to lead in the business intelligence and analytics market. This merger will also deliver premium value and liquidity to Versant’s shareholders.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

But how’s this for the height of irony: Autonomy offers eDiscovery solutions that “help organizations, law firms and legal service providers better meet client needs without the cumbersome integration efforts that other vendors face.” Now wouldn’t it be ironic if HP used those eDiscovery tools to build a case against former Autonomy executives?

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Consider the multiple reports published about Autonomy by accounting research firm CFRA. Dating back to 2007, these raised questions about its lack of nonacquisition-driven revenue growth and unsustainable contributions to cash flow, among other issues. It would be surprising if no one at H-P doing due diligence on the Autonomy deal was aware of such concerns. And what of the back-office integration work once the deal closed? It isn’t uncommon for small software companies to have funky revenue-recognition policies that need updating. Such issues are typically discovered immediately by acquiring companies.

Autonomy wasn’t held as a separate entity, mailing in its quarterly numbers to be consolidated. So H-P should have seen something was amiss soon after the deal closed in October 2011 and certainly before an unnamed whistleblower stepped forward after Mr. Lynch was fired May 23.

The deal also calls into question the role of some top executives. For instance, Ms. Whitman noted that H-

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Meg Whitman got the CEO job because of an inside coup by HP execs that ousted the previous CEO, Léo Apotheker, a former software executive who championed the Autonomy deal.

These execs feared Apotheker’s plan to spin off the hardware business in favor of software.

This lead Whitman to abandon the software strategy, which left Autonomy and Lynch in the lurch.

HP’s convoluted bureaucracy created situations where its own salespeople couldn’t sell Autonomy.

The infamous whistleblower who reportedly alerted HP to Autonomy’s accounting problems couldn’t be the person HP claims.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The fundamental problem is simple—companies frequently seek solutions to their problems, either product strategy or leadership, from outside—making acquisitions to acquire new capabilities and, yes, searching for some form of corporate savior to buttress what seems missing internally. The temptations and the pitfalls in both moves are similar. From the outside, technologies and products look glamorous because their defects and difficulties are much less visible. From the outside, the new executive looks intriguing and exciting—because the inevitable human foibles and weaknesses aren’t yet evident, because scarcity makes things appear more valuable, and because in the recruiting chase, the excitement builds.

In both instances, there are “matchmakers”—executive search firms in the case of the external hires and investment bankers for the deals—who get paid only if the transaction is consummated, and have every economic interest to not only see the deal close, but close quickly. And

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Autonomy isn’t the only black mark on Andreessen’s record since he joined the HP board in 2009. He was also one of the lead directors responsible for recruiting Leo Apotheker, whose fear of the looming appetite of software scared HP into squandering shareholders’ treasure on Autonomy. Moreover, a majority of HP directors did not actually meet Apotheker before his appointment. That effectively meant Andreessen was given extraordinary powers in choosing HP’s leader. By that token, he arguably bears a larger share of the responsibility for the poor choices made by his chosen executive.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Along the way, these people say, Autonomy used aggressive accounting practices to make sure revenue from software licensing kept growing—thereby boosting the British company’s valuation. The firm recognized revenue upfront that under U.S. accounting rules would have been deferred, and struck “round-trip transactions”—deals where Autonomy agreed to buy a client’s products or services while at the same time the client purchased Autonomy software, according to these people.

“The rules aren’t that complicated,” said Dan Mahoney of accounting research business CFRA, who covered Autonomy until it was acquired. He said that Autonomy had the hallmarks of a company that recognized revenue too aggressively. He said neither U.S. nor international accounting rules would allow companies to recognize not-yet collected revenue from customers that might be at risk not to pay, which he said appears to be the case in some of Autonomy’s transactions.

A person familiar with H-P’s investigation said the

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In short, it’s time for HP to position Autonomy as an acquisition that’s showing progress — rather than an acquisition that destroyed HP.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Just to say `we paid too much because of fraud’ doesn’t negate the fact of inadequate due diligence,” said Williams. “Some responsibility needs to come back to HP.”

At least one of HP’s board members, McKesson Corp. CEO John Hammergren, has experience the aftermath of an accounting scandal. McKesson named Hammergren as its CEO after revealing it had been conned into buying software maker HBO & Co. for $12 billion in 1999. The accounting fraud wiped out half of McKesson’s market value. The San Francisco company has since bounced back under Hammergren, but the comeback took years to pull off.

Investors are losing hope that HP will rebound because the company has made so many questionable decisions in the five years since Apple Inc.’s release of the first iPhone changed the way people use technology. The upheaval has reduced demand for HP’s PCs and printers.

“I don’t see how anyone could invest in this company any longer,” said ISI Group analyst Brian Marshall, who described HP as “an

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch continued to fight back at allegations from Hewlett-Packard, sending an open letter Tuesday to H-P’s board.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The company concealed that it had gained control of Autonomy based on financial statements that were unreliable because of accounting manipulation, according to the complaint. Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman and the company’s former CEO, Leo Apotheker, are named as defendants, along with Chief Financial Officer Catherine Lesjak.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[A good read, and many good points made. -DBM]

I utterly reject all allegations of impropriety…
Having no details beyond the limited public information provided last week, and still with no further contact from you, I am writing today to ask you, the board of HP, for immediate and specific explanations for the allegations HP is making. HP should provide me with the interim report and any other documents which you say you have provided to the SEC and the SFO so that I can answer whatever is alleged, instead of the selective disclosure of non-material information via background discussions with the media.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The apparent failure of due diligence in Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of Autonomy brings into question the board’s handling of the deal, says Tony Sondhi, an accounting expert and founder of investment advisory firm, A.C. Sondhi & Associates.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Microsoft is changing the way it prices the “user” option when purchasing client-access licenses (CALs), which will result in higher prices for some customers.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Three Informatica customers were named Leaders in the 2012 Ventana Research Leadership Awards and one Informatica product—PowerCenter Big Data Edition—has won a coveted 2012 Ventana Research Technology Innovation Award.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“We are passionate about delivering beautiful, robust and reliable cloud applications that work the way our customers do,” said Lars Dalgaard, member of the SAP Executive Board. “I announced our cloud strategy acceleration six months ago and since then the response and traction we’ve seen in the market has been monumental. SuccessFactors grew by 92 percent year over year, SAP Business ByDesign subscription billings at 300 percent year over year, companies are embracing SAP Jam as a productivity tool with more than 8 million users. And we’re just getting started. There is so much more to come as we continue to innovate across our cloud portfolio, applying user and mobile-first design principles, to meet our customers’ business needs — and most importantly delight our customers’ end users.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Windows 8 may—may—be struggling now, but sheer scale means it will be adopted by many more people. Eventually.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Just 4 percent of the respondents have been proactively briefed by SAP about indirect access.

Am I Liable? Even though Blake says there are many SAP customers who are surprised by indirect access discussions, the survey found that 31 percent of the respondents believed that their contracts specifically identified liability for indirect access. That surprised him a bit, so he followed up with several respondents. Some of them, he says, told him “the definition of ‘use’ [by SAP] is so broad, that I just figured I was liable.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Social networks were responsible for 0.81 percent of site traffic, with Facebook providing 0.68 percent. And Twitter? Within the IBM study’s margin of error, the social network provided literally 0 percent.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Google is getting better at gadget design faster than Apple is getting better at Internet services.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Now, the Benioffs are giving more money to house homeless families, and the city is renewing its pledge to continue finding homes for parents and children, The Chronicle has learned. The original Benioff donation, made in December 2011, helped house 150 families, and the new donation is expected to put roofs over the heads of dozens more.
Money for charities

The @Benioffs will give $230,000 to Hamilton Family Center’s First Avenues program, which offers case management and rental subsidies for families, including Lord’s. The money will pay for 10 more families to secure housing. The Benioffs will also give $70,000 to The Chronicle’s Season of Sharing program, which offers one-time assistance to families in crisis.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Some proposals could permit governments to censor legitimate speech – or even allow them to cut off internet access.

“Other proposals would require services like YouTube, Facebook, and Skype to pay new tolls in order to reach people across borders. This could limit access to information – particularly in emerging markets.”

Google added that it was concerned that “only governments have a voice at the ITU” and not companies or others who had a stake in the net, concluding that the World Conference on International Telecommunications (Wcit) was “the wrong place” to make decisions about the internet’s future.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The company should be in a celebratory mood. It just launched its new PC and mobile operating systems and for the first time started selling its own computer hardware — the Surface Windows RT tablet. Its hardware partners are coming out with all sorts of new PCs featuring Microsoft Windows 8 and Microsoft finally has a tablet device to compete with Apple’s iPad and the myriad Android tablets.

But things aren’t going well for the software behemoth that was once so dominant that a court declared it to be a monopoly.

Last week, CNET News reported that “Windows 8 got pummeled” by analysts, including Chris Whitmore from Deutsche Bank, who wrote that Windows 8 “will have a more muted impact than prior cycles for a several reasons.” In addition to economic factors beyond Microsoft’s control, he cited mixed reviews, a lack of enterprise interest in the new operating system and confusion around the two flavors of Windows 8 — Windows RT for tablets and Windows Pro for PCs and some tablets.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP is considering a listing in China to give the world’s biggest business software firm the option of tapping financial resources in one of its fastest growing markets.

“We are looking into the possibility of a third listing,” a spokesman said.

SAP will have to wait until China has finalized plans to set up an international board in Shanghai to attract foreign listings.

China has been talking about the launch of an international board on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. It was about to kick off the new board in the second half of last year but the move was delayed by the euro zone debt crisis.

SAP is already listed in Germany and New York.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Microsoft’s proposal has sparked concerns — both old and new — about the visa program that has allowed companies to recruit hundreds of thousands of well-educated foreign nationals to fill U.S. jobs.

Researchers claim that some companies use the visas to bypass older, more expensive American job seekers. And some economists question contentions by Microsoft and other technology firms about a dearth of domestic high-tech talent.

But most troubling to critics is the fact many employers need not prove they are unable to find qualified Americans before turning to foreign hires.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The biggest companies already deploy workloads beyond test-and-dev on AWS. The question is: can AWS sustain that momentum as new options come online?

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

However, there is a great deal of risk for Oracle on this path—it could be seen as fraud, and it certainly erodes trust.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

NAD found that, even accounting for a sophisticated target audience, a consumer would be reasonable to take away the message that all Oracle Exadata systems run five times as fast as all IBM’s Power computer products.
NAD noted in its decision that the fact that the claim was made in the context of a contest announcement did not excuse the advertiser from its obligation to provide substantiation.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oliver speaks a lot of sense and talks in a very succinct way – the video repays a couple of viewings.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Using your brains to think of an idea and your skills to implement it? That’s the old model.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Judge Grewal entered his order, which allows Samsung’s counsel (but not Samsung’s internal decision-makers) to see the entire agreement including license fees, while expressing skepticism of Samsung’s theory that “the financial terms are probative of arguments Samsung raises in its opposition to Apple’s permanent injunction motion” because “to the degree Apple prevails on the contrary argument,9 the licensing fees with HTC are relevant to the degree of consumer demand for Apple’s patented features” and “a royalty is a more suitable alternative to a permanent injunction”. So the hearing allowed Samsung to make an argument — ultimately the outcome-determinative one for the grant of this motion — specific to the license fee information that it had not made in its motion. This was the last opportunity Samsung’s lawyers had to make this argument before the motion would have been dismissed as moot, but they seized it.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Meg Whitman: While HP’s announcement bore little good news for the company’s bottom line, there’s a chance it could end up helping CEO Meg Whitman’s image.

“The silver lining here could be her willingness to take a very realistic but also gutsy stand, and call a spade a spade here,” said analyst Charles King, president of Pund-IT. “I think that will improve her image or at least provide some cover for the additional time and effort she needs to put into the company.”

“Most of the issues confronting HP happened way before her watch,” King added. “She has the unenviable job of cleaning out the stables.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The average large company has six different systems holding supposedly “master” data about customer, nine in the case of product data, and 13% of survey respondents had over 100 such sources.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

When companies agree to have their patented technology incorporated into a standard, they’re required to license the technology to others on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

As evident by its enormous P/E ratio of 73, the company understands enormous growth expectations exist. Still, despite constant competitive pressure from rivals such as Oracle, Microsoft and IBM, Salesforce.com seems committed to turn doubters into believers. On the heels of another earnings beat, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s time for investors to change their view on the company. Said differently, why fight a moving train?

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

CEO Mike Lynch, wouldn’t call it “shopping around” because it would have been illegal to “shop around” a U.K.-based company under that country’s securities laws without disclosing the fact to shareholders.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Software developers participated in a daylong Windows Azure Developer Camp at the Microsoft campus here, one of 23 simultaneous workshops held across the United States Nov. 12, to spur the development of applications that run in the Azure cloud environment.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Also new in SharePoint is an improved user interface, which addressed another shortcoming in earlier versions relating to how documents could be shared. Microsoft increased by a factor of four the number of engineers assigned to working on the user interface for SharePoint 2013, from the previous version, said Jeff Teper, a corporate vice president for Microsoft. SharePoint 2013 “is not a minor ‘dot’ release,” Teper said in a keynote address at the user conference.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“In terms of those two companies, it’s not that we don’t see them,” Benioff clarified. However, he argued that “they have not provided the next-generation vision for customer-based systems” on how to connect with customers, employees, investors, and products.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The social enterprise giant reported a third quarter net loss of $220 million, or $1.55 per share (statement). Non-GAAP earnings were 33 cents a share on a revenue of $788 million, up 35 percent annually.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

it was a great quarter. as you can see. 788 million is up 35%. jim, you know we have been on that talking about the 30% plus both quarters, it is an awesome time to deliver a quarter like that. all of these other things and here we are delivering this great number. 1.29 billion really great. how are you with the operating cash flow for this quarter? well, you can see, we have delivered more than $100 million, this is our 5th consecutive quarter withbrating cash flow in excess of $100 million. we are in a market share game. cloud computing and mobil, nothing is getting our customers faster results or delivery. we are absolutely the leader in the area. most people are trying to back away from europe. why bother? you can see europe had a great quarter. these customers in europe are under tremendousir res. they have to turn to vend dors like us that can deliver solutions right now.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Quarterly Revenue of $788 Million, up 35% Year-Over-Year
• Deferred Revenue of $1.29 Billion, up 41% Year-Over-Year
• Unbilled Deferred Revenue Increases to Approximately $3 Billion
• Raises FY13 Revenue Guidance to $3.041 – $3.046 Billion
• Initiates FY14 Revenue Guidance of $3.80 – $3.85 Billion

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Freiburg will return to Microsoft Office because of severe compatibility problems found with the open-source alternative

[Now what does Freiburg actually mean? -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

When these customers informed SAP of their intentions to cancel maintenance, SAP initially offered modest discounts, only to follow up with significantly larger discounts when the customers pushed back. Given that there was executive level engagement in these discounts, we infer that senior management at SAP is aware of the issue. If SAP institutionalizes discounts on maintenance renewals, it will put significant pressure on its margin profile.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Insert joke here. -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Business software provider Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N) beat Wall Street expectations for the third quarter and maintained its earnings outlook for the rest of its fiscal year despite the cloudy macroeconomic outlook.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Quattrone, who founded boutique Qatalyst Partners after years of fighting regulatory charges, was Autonomy’s lead banker during its sales process. The deal is the second-biggest Qatalyst has advised on, behind only Motorola Mobility’s $12.9 billion sale to Google.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

$584 in revenue — a 36 percent year-over-year increase.

The bulk of that money came from the company’s subscription and support services, which accounted for $549 million. The remainder of the company’s revenue came from its professional services and other sources, and totaled $35 million.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Autonomy, as HP tells it, was selling some hardware at a loss. During a period of about eight quarters prior to HP’s acquisition, Autonomy sold some hardware products that had a very low margin or on which it may have even taken a loss. It then allegedly turned around and booked those hardware sales as high-margin software sales. At least some portion of the cost on these products, Whitman said, was booked as a marketing expense, not as cost of goods sold.

There’s a second piece of the puzzle, where HP says that Autonomy was selling software to value-added resellers — the middlemen in so many technology transactions — in which there are ultimately no end users. That, too, inflated apparent revenue.

Third, there were some long-term hosting deals — essentially, Autonomy hosting applications for its customers on a subscription basis — that were converted to short-term licensing deals. Future revenue for software subscriptions — that should have been deferred or recorded as coming in the

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“It seems very late in the day that HP would find accounting irregularities,” he said….
“The board relied on audited financials — audited by Deloitte — not Brand X accounting firm but Deloitte,” Whitman said today on a conference call with investors. “The CEO at the time and the head of strategy who led this deal are both gone — Leo Apotheker and Shane Robison.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

For the sake of its board, shareholders, and the rest of the industry, HP should reveal exactly who conducted its research on Autonomy and how and why they managed to miss this “fraud”–as well as why it went undiscovered after the acquisition for so long.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

HP has referred this matter to the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Enforcement Division and the UK’s Serious Fraud Office for civil and criminal investigation. In addition, HP is preparing to seek redress against various parties in the appropriate civil courts to recoup what it can for its shareholders. The company intends to aggressively pursue this matter in the months to come.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The only concept I have of it is that it does seem to be coincident with them releasing the worst set of results in their 70 year company history.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Lynch said the mismanagement came after HP took over the company.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle Corp. has joined BSA as a global advocacy member to help advance policies that promote technology innovation.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Twitter hasn’t released an official Twitter client in the Windows Store yet, but it remains one of the most popular apps on other platforms. The fact that Twitter hasn’t released an official modern UI style app shows that big app developers are still not allocating the same resources to Windows Store apps. According to the company, it’s a work in progress:

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Current Evaluation – 3

Evaluation Explanation – Restructured program is being closely monitored

[If this is a “3,” then I’d hate to see a “2!” -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[This is from a year ago. The project was a massive failure then, and yet it kept going for a year despite severe financial constraints on the government. -DBM]

The project that Oracle win in 2005 was initially scoped at $88.5 million and was to replace over 240 legacy systems and more than 500 interfaces.

The final cost of the ECSS to taxpayers will be somewhere between $3 billion to $5.2 billion, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). The decision to whether the Oracle systems, which is being installed by CSC, will be scrapped, modified or shelved will be made by the end of the year.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Underway since 2005, the ECSS program was supposed to save billions of dollars by streamlining supply chain management and providing an integrated approach for buying, moving and managing equipment. But the service fired the lead contractor, Computer Sciences Corp., in March. The next month, Air Force Controller Jamie Morin told a Senate subcommittee that he was “personally appalled” by how little the Air Force had gotten for its investment. In an interview afterward, Morin described the system’s capability as “negligible”.

Continuing the program would have cost an estimated $1.1 billion for about one-quarter of the original scope, with fielding delayed until 2020, added Gulick.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle won the contract in 2005 over competing vendors like SAP. Sources tell me that Computer Sciences Corporation was the system integrator. IBM has not yet responded with a comment or confirmation.

“Everybody blames each other, and nobody takes credit,” said Wang. He told me that projects like these can goes wrong on all levels: Vendors promise more than they can deliver, system integraters aren’t always cooperative, and clients don’t document as thoroughly as they should.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The system includes Click Commerce’s Service Parts Planning and Optimization solution, Oracle’s Enterprise Resource Planning software and IFS’ Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul solution.
ECSS will replace and perform the functions of more than 700 logistics systems currently used by the Air Force. The new software will allow commanders at all levels in the logistics chain to automate the process of gathering and interpreting logistics data, and help them to make effective decisions. The system will support the entire Air Force – providing a single, easy-to-use interface for as many as 250,000 users.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

As ever more companies withdraw from chip manufacturing, Intel manages to keep turning the crank profitably. During Otellini’s reign, Intel has so far generated $107 billion in cash from operations and paid dividends of $23.5 billion.

But Intel also has failed to come to terms with a powerful force in the processor world — the rise of mobile devices using low-power ARM processors. These are the chips that power every iPhone and iPad, almost every Android device, and the new Microsoft Surface tablet.

It’s an embarrassing absence for Intel. The company has gained a tiny foothold with its Medfield generation of processors, which are used for example in Motorola Razr i phone and some other products. But mostly, Intel is conspicuous in this market by its absence from a market that is both large and fast-growing.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Cisco said that it wanted to acquire Meraki because the IT industry is increasingly moving toward the “mobile-cloud era.” By adding Meraki’s Wi-Fi and cloud-networking know-how to Cisco’s software-focused offerings, the company believes that it will be able to simply IT operations for its customers. Cisco also pointed to the possible bonus of generating new revenue opportunities with its other partners.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

40 years with the company.

Intel Corp. said Monday that its board will look at company executives as well as external candidates to replace Otellini. He has been head of Intel for eight years.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Awarded “Epic Status” in every Major Category including: Application Retirement, Database Manageability, Operational/Cost Savings and Performance Archiving by Constellation Research

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

A month after Oracle Racing’s custom-made USA 17 cartwheeled into the bay and hurled its hot shot crew into the cold Bay waters and crumpled the sail structure, Ellison’s sailing syndicate is racing against the clock to perform repairs and be ready to compete by next summer’s America’s Cup finals in the bay.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Torvalds can say what he wants because — unlike most of the world’s best-known software developers — he doesn’t work for a big technology company with a public relations department. If he worked for IBM or Red Hat, he’d probably be clamped down. But Torvalds is a free operator, his salary paid by the non-profit Linux Foundation. So whenever he needs a break from code-wrangling the Linux project, he fires away on Google+. It’s the same honest attitude that turned Linux into such a success story.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Quoting Oracle database executive Andy Mendelsohn, the piece points out that Oracle’s in-memory database is TimesTen, which runs inside the Exalytics appliance (along with an in-memory version of the Essbase database). That box is a sort of analytics turbocharger, and it’s plugged into yet another box, Exadata, which runs on Oracle Database. But here was Evans, protesting that Microsoft was disingenuous in suggesting that Oracle is “forcing customers to buy, learn, and manage a separate solution.”

If Oracle Database had in-memory capabilities, you wouldn’t need a separate Exalytics box. But Mendelsohn acknowledges that Oracle Database is limited to “some in-memory database features.” He doesn’t say how or when, but Mendelsohn promises that Oracle “plans to continue to enhance Oracle Database in-memory capabilities.”

So on Microsoft’s side it’s true we have only a beta product and fuzzy delivery date, but on Oracle’s side we have a “yeah, we’re going to do that, too” promise by one ex

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Google tops the list of average base salaries for software engineers, with No. 2 Facebook trailing slightly behind. Apple, eBay and Zynga were also in the top five, according to Glassdoor, which analyzed pay rates for software engineers based on anonymous salary data from recent and current employees at 15 tech companies provided voluntarily.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Big Data is smoking hot. Today, 10gen the company behind the commercialization of MongoDB, announced a strategic investment from Intel Capital and Red Hat. MongoDB is part of the database wars we are seeing in the Big Data space. SiliconANGLE and Wikibon have released research that show that Mongo is growing more popular than Hadoop. See our TrendConnect research at the bottom of this post for that data.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“In our enterprise accounts, the bulk of the implementations are done by partners,” says Ross Piper, senior vice president for enterprise strategy and alliances at Salesforce.com.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

We talked about his regrets (none), his optimism about the future of technology, his take on the Scott Forstall saga and, most interestingly, his “worry” that Microsoft has become a more innovative company than Apple.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Some 20 startups have inked commercial deals with SAP that will see them run production applications with the HANA in-memory database on Amazon Web Services, SAP announced Thursday during the Tech Ed and Sapphire conferences in Madrid.

In addition, 153 startups are now part of a special program SAP launched six months ago in hopes of quickly creating a partner ecosystem for HANA, which became generally available last year and has since become a central focus of the vendor’s technical and product road maps.

Those 153 companies were culled from more than 800 in 17 countries which expressed interest in the program, according to SAP. A majority are from what SAP called “non-traditional markets.” One is Better Food, a provider of “sustainable and safe food management services across the value chain,” according to a statement.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“I’d hardly call Surface competition,” Bradley said in an interview with CITEworld. He listed several reasons, “One, very limited distribution. It tends to be slow and a little kludgey as you use it …. It’s expensive. Holistically, the press has made a bigger deal out of Surface than what the world has chosen to believe.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

These Windows Store app labs are designed to provide a boost to the development process, whether a developer needs help bringing their ideas together to form the beginnings of an app or simply wants to test their app on a range of Windows 8 equipment. Each app lab will last for four hours and will be taking place in a variety of locations around the globe, including New York, London, Paris, and Shanghai.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The new offerings build on software IBM attained in its acquisition of Worklight—a privately held Israeli-based provider of mobile software for smartphones and tablets—earlier this year and also taps some of IBM’s Tivoli technology and other products. The move is strategic as it targets a growing opportunity that is expected to drive $130 billion in revenue by 2015, said Mike Riegel, vice president of IBM Mobile Enterprise and WebSphere.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The application aims to allow banks to apply different stress scenarios, such as adjusted run-off rates and bond haircuts, to gain a deeper understanding of how market volatility can impact liquidity positions.
Another is the SAP Accelerated Trade Promotion Planning app, which aims to allow consumer packaged goods companies to customise trade promotions. It is intended to help analyse massive volumes of promotion-related data in real time to instantly test new scenarios for individual promotions and make adjustments on the fly.
SAP POS Data Management is intended to allow retailers to screen billions of records to better predict likely stock levels by applying predictive algorithms to sales data or detect fraudulent activities at the point of sale using the SAP Loss Prevention Analytics for Retail application.
Other apps are designed for common challenges in the telecoms, high tech & manufacturing industries, while others tackle more generic business challenges like process management.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The stock, once up 74 percent on the year, is still up 30 percent for 2012. That’s why Wall Street is getting out while it can.

“Someone yelled fire in the theater where the hedge funds were safely booking their year-end profits—and as traders do, they will trample you trying to be first to get to the exit,” said David Greenberg of Greenberg Capital.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

$10 million Series A round from Battery Ventures and Ignition Partners, as well as Andreessen Horowitz, Data Collective and Amplify Partners. Co-founders Todd Papaioannou, Jonathan Gray and Nitin Motgi began building Continuuity in late 2011, and closed a $2.5 million seed round in January 2012.

The cash infusion will help Palo Alto, Calif.-based Continuuity further develop technology that abstracts the complexity of building and deploying Hadoop applications and also opens Hadoop up to entirely new types of workloads. Although Continuuity’s AppFabric is built atop Hadoop and a collection of related technologies, it lets developers build what might be called big data applications, generally, rather than just Hadoop (read “inherently limited MapReduce“) applications. Taking advantage of YARN and HBase, for example, the company was able to build out methods for processing stream data in real time and elastically scaling a Hadoop cluster even while jobs are running.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

U.S. semiconductor company to eliminate around 5 percent of workforce in a bid to cut costs and focus investments on its embedded systems.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Titan is powered by 560,640 processors, which is actually less than the 1,572,864 cores that power Sequoia. Titan was turned on at the end of October at the U.S Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

One of the six apps announced Tuesday was built first for Windows 8. Called SAP WorkDeck, the app integrates various information sources and work processes into a single view to allow workers to initiate new work requests and monitor the process of the work. Managers will be able to use the app to respond to and oversee workflows from a mobile device, such as travel, leave and purchase requests, SAP said.

All six apps take advantage of the touchscreen capability of Windows 8 in tablets and other devices, including the Snap dual-screen mode. Once available, they can be downloaded from the Windows Store for a trial evaluation before a purchase.

In addition to the six apps, SAP also announced an SAP Mobile Platform to support creation and deployment of custom apps in HTML5 and JavaScript using Visual Studio for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Any platform takes a good amount of effort to develop for, but it takes a lot of maintenance to keep your app up and working well as the platform evolves,” he says. “Each platform is a moving target. Any platform we choose to develop for we have to know that we’re ready to not only build it once but to continue to invest in it.”

This is why part of Microsoft’s focus is on middleware. Cross-platform tools offered by companies like Marmalade and Unity make it cheaper to bring an iOS app to the Windows Phone platform. Companies don’t necessarily have to hire a separate team dedicated solely to Windows platforms if they are interested in building a new app.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

New features in SPS5 include a “read-optimized column store” for OLAP (online analytic processing) as well as a “write-optimized row store” for OLTP (online transaction processing) applications, SAP said.

The update also includes improved text analytics, allowing companies to analyze text-based data from social media and other sources in 31 languages, new library functions for predictive analytics, and application server features for deploying applications from HANA.

In addition, SPS5 focuses on larger-scale HANA deployments, with features such as “hot and warm standby servers,” as well as tie-ins to third-party backup tools for disaster tolerance and failover capabilities.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle has taken a “strategic” minority stake in Engine Yard, a San Francisco supplier of platform-as-a-service (PaaS), where developers build applications in a tools-rich, online environment.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Julie Larson-Green will be promoted to lead all Windows software and hardware engineering. Tami Reller retains her roles as chief financial officer and chief marketing officer and will assume responsibility for the business of Windows. Both executives will report directly to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Workday does 3 releases a year, and even more impressive is what Dave Duffield describes as “the force of one” – having all customers on the same release is much more empowering. SaaS/Cloud vendors have dramatically shrunk the announcement/availability/customer acceptance cycle.

It is also an existential threat to on-premise models. In on-premise world, there is often a 3-4 year gap between product announcement and availability, then another 4-5 years till the last customer goes on that release. That is an eternity compared to SaaS world announcement/availability/acceptance cycle.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

McAfee is a prime suspect in the murder of American expatriate Gregory Faull, who was gunned down Saturday night at his home in San Pedro Town on the island of Ambergris Caye.

Details remain sketchy so far, but residents say that Faull was a well-liked builder who hailed originally from Florida. The two men had been at odds for some time. Last Wednesday, Faull filed a formal complaint against McAfee with the mayor’s office, asserting that McAfee had fired off guns and exhibited “roguish behavior.” Their final disagreement apparently involved dogs.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SaaS and cloud-based business application services will grow from $13.4B in 2011 to $32.2B in 2016, CAGR of 19.1%…
IDC reports that enterprise cloud application revenues reached $22.9B in 2011 and is projected reach $67.3B by 2016, CAGR of 24%…
11% of companies are transformational, early adopters of cloud computing, attaining 44% adoption (as defined by % of MIPS) in 2010, growing to 49% in 2013…
Gartner is predicting IaaS, cloud management & security devices, and PaaS are growing from $7.6B in 2011 to $35.5B in 2016, CAGR of 36%…
The global PaaS market is growing from $900M in 2011 to $2.9B in 2016, 26.6% CAGR…
In 2011, the worldwide enterprise application software market generated $115.1B in revenue, and is projected to grow to $157.6B by 2016, 6.5% CAGR in the forecast period…
Transportation, insurance, banking and securities, and communications, media and services (CM&S); and manufacturing providing g the greatest growth opportunities through 2016…

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Innovatio’s tactics, Cisco argues in its lawsuit, are “misleading, fraudulent and unlawful.” It says they effectively amount to an extortion scheme, and therefore violate federal antiracketeering laws.

Separately, Cisco claims that Ottawa-based Mosaid Technologies Inc. violated the same laws by allegedly paying witnesses for testimony and documents in order “to overcome fatal shortcomings” in patent-infringement claims it filed against Cisco in 2011 at the U.S. International Trade Commission.

“When someone runs a racket, we’re going to make them liable for racketeering,” said Mark Chandler, Cisco’s general counsel.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Apple’s settlement with HTC comes as its bigger fight with Samsung gets increasingly bitter, meaning that a more conclusive settlement between smartphone makers still looks some way off.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The company’s downtown Salt Lake City facility is expected to add 500 new employees over the 15-year lifetime of the project. Earlier this year, an agreement for 250 new employees was announced. Today, the company has more than 1,500 employees worldwide.

According to the Governor’s Office of Economic Development, all of the 500 new positions will pay a minimum of 125 percent of Salt Lake County’s average yearly wage including benefits, totaling more than $719 million. Workday will also pay over $54 million in new state taxes over the life of the agreement.

The office’s Board of Directors approved an $8.4 million economic development tax increment financing post-performance refundable tax credit, or 25 percent of the new state tax revenue, which will be paid by the company over the 15-year life of the agreement.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

QlikTech: “It wasn’t about taxes,” Bjork began, adding that it was largely a coincidence that he chose Radnor over Philly when deciding on a new headquarters for his Swedish company. Radnor also seemed more convenient for international visitors, he said, though he bemoaned the fact that the Main Line lacks a great hotel.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Chris Ross is now leading worldwide sales, as well as continuing to lead sales in Europe and the Middle East (EMEA), while Louise Lautin leads worldwide marketing.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The impact of cloud on IT budgets will also vary by company size — large enterprises are likely to replace some of their spending on traditional IT services with public cloud spending. However, as public cloud services are also being adopted by small and midsize businesses — previously not the target market for most IT services companies – there are new spending opportunities developing in the SME sector.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The company has updated its Cloud SQL service, increasing the maximum size of databases tenfold and the maximum size of instances fourfold. Users can also now choose whether they want their database stored in a US or EU datacentre.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Aneel announced two new offerings, “New Workday Recruiting Application To Transform Talent Acquisition” and “Workday Unveils Big Data Analytics For HR and Finance”:

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

He had a Top 10 list why Workday went IPO which included a reference to “if Anderson Cooper can come out, so can we”
He teased his co-founder Aneel Bhusri about bragging about product features, and that he could do better with contract closings and invited the CIO of City of Orlando to sign her contract on stage.
He gave his CFO palpitations with frequent teasing on forward looking stuff and a guessing game on the + in a slide which showed 350+ customers. After the Orlando signing his slide changed to 351+ customers
He presented a photo gallery which showcased his family members and pets as fans of various Workday customer products.
In a dig at Oracle, he quipped “I love walking all over on Fusion” and pointed to the brand of shoes he was wearing
He periodically had slides with SAP and Oracle characters peeping in the conference room
He tossed Cloud Cakes (a Twinkie like product of one of his customers, McKee) with gusto into the crowd, then wondered if he had adequate legal protection

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Executive keynotes – video]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The CIO of Global Functions at HP Scott Spradley stood up and told the story at Workday Rising earlier this week of how Co-Founder David Duffield will tell you “what you need to hear” not always what you “want to hear” and in 2009 asked Workday “do you want HP as a customer” and heard “We want you as a customer but not right now as we want to wait until we are able to give you the best experience possible”. He went on to tell the story of how this reinforced the trust he had in Workday and HP recently became a new customer and the largest one ever with over 300,000 employees. If SAP has a similar customer story it would great if we could hear it on stage at Sapphire Orlando, as it was very compelling.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

IBM also violated its contract with Avantor by staffing the project with “incompetent and reckless consultants” who made “numerous design, configuration and programming errors,” it states.

In addition, IBM “intentionally or recklessly failed” to tell Avantor about risks to the project and charged toward a go-live date, the suit alleges.

“To conceal the Systems defects and functional gaps, IBM ignored the results of its own pre-go-live tests, conducted inadequate and truncated testing and instead recommended that Avantor proceed with the go-live as scheduled even though Avantor had repeatedly emphasized to IBM that meeting a projected go-live date was far less important than having a fully functional System that would not disrupt Avantors ability to service its customers,” the suit states.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

It’s actually a precautionary tale to avoid SAP like the plague. Here’s why.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

He’s the man who reopened the community pool.

Through that modest act, Ellison has already won over some of the island’s 3,200 residents, who were used to living under the tighter purse strings of Lanai’s last owner, fellow billionaire David Murdock.

“Murdock was shutting the money off and cutting costs,” said Lanai resident Pat Reilly, 72, who spent 31 years as a counselor at Lanai High and Elementary School. “With the sale, the faucet came back on.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

As part of that commitment, in instances when we believe an account may have been compromised, we reset the password and send an email letting the account owner know this has happened along with information about creating a new password. This is a routine part of our processes to protect our users.

In this case, we unintentionally reset passwords of a larger number of accounts, beyond those that we believed to have been compromised. We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Throughout the day, people sent more than 31 million election-related Tweets (which contained certain key terms and relevant hashtags). And as results rolled in, we tracked the surge in election-related Tweets at 327,452 Tweets per minute (TPM). These numbers reflect the largest election-related Twitter conversation during our 6 years of existence, though they don’t capture the total volume of all Tweets yesterday.

As an engineering team, we keep an eye on all of the activity across the platform –– in particular, on the number of Tweets per second (TPS). Last night, Twitter averaged about 9,965 TPS from 8:11pm to 9:11pm PT, with a one-second peak of 15,107 TPS at 8:20pm PT and a one-minute peak of 874,560 TPM. Seeing a sustained peak over the course of an entire event is a change from the way people have previously turned to Twitter during live events.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

For Microsoft, their product stars seem to have aligned at roughly the same time this month:
– Search engine Bing reached a two-year high in consumer perception.
– The Windows brand is at its highest perception point since the introduction of Windows 7 in October 2009.
– Microsoft is getting its best perception marks of the year from tablet owners.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Jimmy Kimmel and his writers are doing some very nice work with Apple the last couple months. The intro here has a bit more bite than you normally get from network TV: “Anyone standing in line for an iPad mini in New York or New Jersey this week should be punched in the throat.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The center is to house an advanced technology laboratory, a research and development platform for the company’s Bing search engine, as well as a business incubator aimed at promoting local Internet technology startups.

It will be housed in an abandoned 18th century building, once Rio’s first gas factory, in the city’s downtown port, a now shabby district undergoing a vast makeover ahead of the 2016 Olympic Games.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Germany accounts for over 48 percent of Europe’s software revenue, according to the Truffle list, bringing in €18.1bn of the continent’s €37.2bn software revenues last year. However, SAP remains Europe’s 100lb gorilla, accounting for €14bn of software revenues in 2011.

The company dwarfs its nearest rival in Europe: France’s Dassault Systemes, the second biggest software company in the continent, accounted for €1.8bn of revenue in 2011 – almost one-tenth that of SAP. Germany’s second biggest software company, banking software firm Wincor Nixdorf, brought in €1.7bn, and secured fourth place on the list, behind the UK’s Sage.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In Microsoft’s other two announcements, the company released Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and it announced that the next release of the Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) will debut in the first half of 2013. With that, PDW will move from SQL Server 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2012, and it will also gain a new feature called PolyBase, which will support federated querying against the SQL Server 2012 relational database as well as data in Microsoft’s just-released Hadoop platform, Microsoft HDInsight Server for Windows.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Here are the main points:

High performance, in memory OLTP engine.
Full ACID support.
T-SQL compiled to native code.
Enables massive improvement in performance. This will allow you to onramp existing apps to give you integrated performance for data loading, updating. And reading throughput is increased comparing best cases, due to the lack of latching and locking contention on the table.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

And you’ll straight away almost a 10X performance increase. I haven’t changed the app.

TED KUMMERT: Haven’t changed the hardware either.

SHAWN BICE: All I did — I didn’t change the app and I didn’t change the hardware. In fact, if I expand this diagnostic window, you’ll see that we’re using more of the CPU and latches are gone. (Cheers, applause.) Love this stuff. All right. Let me hide this window and I’m going to stop this because the story gets better. Want to see it?

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In-memory database for OLTP (Project
“Hekaton”): This high performance memory-
optimized online transactional processing
(OLTP) engine is integrated into SQL Server. It
is a full relational database management
system (RDBMS) with full ACID (atomicity,
consistency, isolation, durability) support and
memory-optimized indexes for high per-
formance. This in-memory database will offer
customers up to 50 times the improvement in
performance and the opportunity to take
advantage of existing investments in SQL
Server. Customers like Edgenet are already
seeing performance gains of up to 25 times in
early trials of project Hekaton.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The new database is codenamed “Hekaton,” and will be available in “the next major release of SQL Server,” Ted Kummert, vice president of Microsoft’s Business Platform Division, told attendees at Microsoft’s database conference taking place in Seattle this week.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Between October 1997 and February 2004, 28 requests for an evaluation version of CocoBase were received from email addresses connected with Oracle domain names, the complaint states. From September 1997 to June 2003, Thought also received 118 evaluation copy requests from email addresses with domain names associated with Sun Microsystems, it adds.

On May 2, 2002, Thought founder Ward Mullins emailed Oracle middleware executive Ted Farrell, the complaint states. Mullins “identified certain technologies covered by Thought’s current and then-pending patent rights so that Oracle would not ‘accidentally violate [Thought’s] intellectual property.’”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Rory McInerney, vice president of Intel’s architecture group said that future Itanium chips would be built using some of the key features found in the company’s more widely used Xeon server processors. He did not say when future chips would be released.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Instantis, which counts big names like Abbott Laboratories, Credit Suisse Group AG and Xerox Corp. among its biggest customers, sells project portfolio management software–tools that help IT help desks and product managers track their progress on projects. CA Inc. offers similar products for its IT customers.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Prior to the release of Workday 18, we were invited to Workday’s Pleasanton headquarters as part of a representative group of the customer base to learn about what’s new and provide feedback, a gathering Workday hosts for every one of its updates. We were also given a “sandbox” copy of our production system, including all of our data, to experience some of the new look-and-feel changes in Workday 18. Workday talked us through changes, and explained the reasons for them. We got to hear from product teams on product direction.

It’s important that software providers gather knowledge and expertise from their customers. Most traditional enterprise software vendors have user groups, but I’ve not had a similar experience to the Workday community when working with the on-premise software industry. To see fairly immediately how our team has influenced the design of a product is a unique experience–enough to make me want to stand up and clap.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Gone are the days when marketing was the creative engine that focused on brand imaging and creativity. That world has disappeared – replaced by science, analytics and razor-sharp execution of programs to engage in what IDC call digital and interpersonal dialogs.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Thomas Langenbach, a top executive at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, could face five years in state prison if convicted, said Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Paola Estanislao.

Estanislao said Langenbach turned down an offer for a less severe sentence. If he had pleaded guilty to two of the felony counts, he would’ve received just eight months in county jail, three years of formal probation and paid restitution for the other thefts, she said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Shares of Workday Inc. edged up Tuesday morning as three of the main underwriters of its initial public offering last month assigned neutral ratings to the stock just ahead of the company’s Workday Rising conference for customers, partners and employees.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

To be sure, Salesforce.com already has a broad partner program, with 2,300 people attending its partner day at its Dreamforce event in San Francisco in September. And in April, Salesforce.com unveiled a program to train 1,000 partners and integrators to use its cloud-based applications in the government sector.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The ragtag group of sailors and crew members are building a tiny model of their wrecked sailboat to participate in Saturday’s Red Bull Flugtag in San Francisco, a silly event in which 33 teams will compete to see how far they can launch eclectic flying devices into the water from a 30-foot-tall platform.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

we expect Workday to enjoy a decade long run of Oracle/SAP replacements…Workday differs from its SaaS peer group because it is exclusively a big deal business; Workday’s ASP is approximately $480K and growing. While the company is and will continue to operate at significant losses in the near term, the compounding effect of large deals in a subscription model will enable the company to be profitable at a $1.5B rev run rate and still enjoy strong growth rates.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

After spending time with the new Windows touch UI, Windows 8 on tablet, and Windows Phone 8, I now see that the company really does have a unified strategy going forward and that, thankfully, mobile is a key part. This is critical to Microsoft’s future since mobile is where the growth will be for the next seven years. And whether Microsoft likes it or not, PC sales will remain steady and possibly decline over that time period, thus seriously impacting its earning potential with traditional products.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Infor offers an attractive option for firms that prioritize functionality over technology and choice over uniformity.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Workday version 18 features a beefed-up financial management component that includes improved global tax and payment capabilities; more detailed reporting functionality; and a “project scenario planning” feature that uses Workday’s human-resources software along with the financials module, allowing managers to “allocate resources seamlessly across projects with details that include cost, worker availability, skills, and experience,” according to a statement.

Workday 18 also features grants management and fund accounting for government bodies and educational institutions, Workday said.

Other new features in the update focus on human resources capabilities, such as a new employee profile system and the ability to punch in and out of work from mobile devices and web browsers.

Workday has also made additions at the platform level, with custom field management tools that make it easy for customers to configure the software to their liking, according to a statement.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The second [area] is retail and banking, where we sell a mobile solution that touches the consumer. For instance, we sell a mobile banking solution in significant parts of Asia to banks. Take one of our large banks we’re working with in Bangladesh called Dutch-Bangla Bank. They have a couple of million users today but they plan to get mobile banking to half the population of Bangladesh. That’s 80 million people. Those 80 million people have never seen an ATM card, don’t know what a bank looks like, but they all have a phone. Now they can get their account balance, maybe use SMS to do a micropayment.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP and Ariba will terminate the current network fee structure that charges a percentage of transactional value to suppliers by 2015 and replace it with flat connectivity charges (either annual subscriptions for basic connectivity or per-document pricing). Curious to learn more about the thought process behind this prediction? We hope you find the snippet below piques your interest in Spend Matters PRO.

[Under SAP] Supplier-focused business models will be given equal or greater weight – A major element of Ariba’s turnaround, furthered by the acquisition of Quadrem, was shifting the cost equation from buyers to suppliers for transactional procurement activity. By making suppliers pay more for transactional network fees, Ariba could effectively charge less for buyers and still maintain an attractive gross margin that was in line with smaller, best of breed competitors (like Coupa, that would often cost more than Ariba in subscription-fees after changing the business model).

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Ariba, it is hoped, will turn a business marketplaces into a kind of corporate social network. The equivalent of status updates on Facebook will be awareness of goods that are available, the status of payments or of products in transit.

There are, of course, no guarantees this will come true, but it is an interesting idea.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Our first rule is to not hire anyone who’s not brilliant at what they do,” he says, chuckling at the obvious. “Our second rule is don’t hire anyone you can’t have dinner with.” The premise is that if you can’t enjoy sharing a meal, you won’t enjoy sitting across the big, square table sitting out in the open that serves as a multi-person desk for Phillips and his executive team. “Anyone can walk up and talk to us any time,” he says. Rather than an intrusion on his workflow, Phillips insists these interruptions make him more productive.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The round, led by Sunstone Capital, brings the total amount raised by Neo Technology to more than $24 million. The investment will be used to fuel product development, meet the needs of Neo’s rapidly expanding customer base, and to further deliver on the company’s vision for mass adoption of graph databases. All of Neo Technology’s current institutional investors, including Fidelity Growth Partners Europe and Conor Venture Partners, are participating above pro rata in this round.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The programming language Java, which started life with such promise in 1995, has mutated into a computer monster. Like Frankenstein’s creation, it needs to be killed to spare us any more misery.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SurfCast, based in Portland, Maine, has no products on the market but does claim ownership of four patents. That should sound familiar. The four patents — 6,724,403; 7,028,264; 7,376,907 and 7,987,431 – all cover a “System and method for simultaneous display of multiple information sources.” Ironically, all four patents cite prior Microsoft patents in their filing as prior art.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Google made what has become a common request for a tech company fighting for billions of dollars: a public court proceeding conducted largely in secret.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The new SAP Jam application lets employees connect with fellow workers and collaborate around business processes, content and data. It combines what SAP described as “the best parts” of the Jam product SuccessFactors developed prior to the acquisition, with added capabilities and components from SAP StreamWork — a social networking product SAP developed earlier.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Hurd promised that Oracle (with Ellison’s blessing) would seize the microprocessor lead from IBM over the coming year, thanks to its investment and commitment in the business. “We have lots of money. Because we have an owner that counts it,” he joked, drawing chuckles from the audience.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Play with it for a few minutes and it becomes obvious the two companies have exercised their many powers to get everything right.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Billings, or the amount invoiced to customers, rose 23 percent for the third quarter ending in September compared with a year ago, and are up 54 percent over the first nine months of this year, according to the company. It plans to announce those results next week.

SugarCRM has raised a total of $79 million from New Enterprise Associates, Silicon Valley Bank, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and others, including a $33 million round in April.

The company has an unorthodox business model for CRM software, which lets companies’ sales teams track leads and deals. About 800,000 users run a free, open-source version of the product and nearly 200,000 pay for versions that cost $30 to $100 per user each month, Augustin said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

At issue is U.S. Patent 6,724,403, titled “System and Method for Simultaneous Display of Multiple Information Sources,” which SurfCast was awarded in 2004.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Developers are now crafting applications for BlackBerry 10, and RIM’s enterprise teams have started presenting BB10 devices and services to business customers.

“Our engineers are fully mobilized to ensure that BlackBerry 10 launches flawlessly in the first quarter of 2013,” Heins said.

This may be RIM’s last chance to impress. In July, the company had to fend off rumors that it was falling into a “death spiral,” as Heins put it. The Ontario-based company announced brutally low financial results this summer, and has already pushed back the rollout of BlackBerry 10 from late 2012 to early 2013.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The management shakeup, Cook’s biggest since becoming CEO last year, also brings new responsibilities for Jony Ive, Apple’s design whiz; Eddy Cue, who runs Apple’s online services; Bob Mansfield, who retired this year but is returning to focus on “future products”; and Craig Federighi, who is now in charge of the Mac operating system.

Separately, early reviews for Apple’s long-awaited iPad mini have started to trickle out.

The 7.9-inch tablet computer, which begins shipping Friday, has largely received solid marks, although complaints about its non-retina display quality (the iPad mini features the same display as the iPad 2) and high price have kept it from receiving glowing reviews.

“By pricing the mini so high, Apple allows the $200 class of 7-inch Android tablets and readers to live (Google Nexus, Kindle Fire HD, Nook HD). Those tablets also, by the way, have high-definition screens (1,280 by 800 pixels), which the mini doesn’t,” wrote David Pogue of the New York Times.

“I’ve a

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“I always thought about this like marrying off your daughter. You know it’s the right thing to do, you just want to hold on a little more — but it’s time to move on to other challenges.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

If you’re an Office 365 Enterprise customer, the latest wave of “Office 15″ features are starting to roll out, as well. The aforementioned spokesperson noted that Microsoft has started rolling out new capabilities to Office 365 Enterprise users via Microsoft’s regular service updates. These updates will occur starting in late October and continue through general availability (early 2013, according to Microsoft).

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

StreamWork was released a couple of years ago with much fanfare but never seemed to gain much market traction. While existing StreamWork customers will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future, SAP isn’t going to conduct new development on a standalone version, said Sameer Patel, global vice president and general manager, social software solutions.

“SAP Jam is the go-forward platform,” he said. “We’re basically building everything on the Jam foundation.” SAP has “re-created StreamWork elements” on Jam, Patel added.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

IT projects, in total, had a cost overrun of $66 billion, more than the GDP of Luxembourg. We also found that the longer a project is scheduled to last, the more likely it is that it will run over time and budget, with every additional year spent on the project increasing cost overruns by 15 percent.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Collaborative business processes are supported via integrations with SuccessFactors Business Execution (BizX) Suite, the on-premise SAP® Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application, the mobile client for the SAP® Financials OnDemand solution and the SAP® Sales OnDemand solution for social onboarding or learning, collaborative opportunity or service request management, and social customer or partner engagement.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Informatica continues to innovate. For example, Informatica Data Controls provides a framework for developing MDM-based applets that can be embedded in existing applications. Informatica MDM is available in the cloud through partners in an IaaS deployment, and a multitenant SaaS deployment option in the public cloud is planned for 2013 — although for salesforce.com users the strategy now is to offer Informatica Cloud MDM based on the Data Scout acquisition. In the social networking area Informatica MDM 9.5 provides a prebuilt connector to Facebook which invokes a Facebook application, allowing the enrichment of internal master data with social data. Additionally, Informatica 9.5 provides location-based master data access functions on tablets and other mobile devices, and in the big data area there are plans to release a matching capability for Hadoop within the Informatica MDM product at end 2012. The longer term road map includes a facility called Semantic Master that creates a best

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP announced today that it is offering new packages that integrate Hadoop software with its analytics and database technologies, including its much-touted HANA in-memory platform and Sybase IQ server, a columnar database and enterprise data warehouse.

SAP also announced packages integrating Hadoop and SAP Data Integrator and across the SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence (BI) suite.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The vulnerabilities exist in versions 15.0.3 and later. According to database security firm Application Security, just two of the 12 flaws the company reported to Sybase earlier this year have been truly fixed. Many of the bugs are privilege escalation issues, while others allow attackers to execute arbitrary code. The most serious of the bugs, CR 694649, has a severity rating of 8.3 on a 10.0 scale.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Under pressure from the U.S. government, Huawei will miss the Windows Phone 8 launch today. Facing setbacks, Chinese smartphones makers could turn to developing their own mobile operation systems.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

For the Washington DC strategists, the question of who captures Silicon Valley depends in large part on who moves first: the Republicans on social issues, or the Democrats on fiscal issues. But in Silicon Valley, the question is how entrepreneurs can make government work better, be it through Republican or Democratic candidates. Entrepreneurs after all tend to see ourselves not as pawns to be captured in a political game but as kings and king-makers. The only party a hacker can belong to for long is no party at all.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

A lock-up period that had prevented such sales expired on Monday. U.S. stock markets opened on Wednesday for the first time since Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast, so that’s when employees could start selling.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Every time you build an application — NoSQL or otherwise — that stores data redundantly with other applications over other data stores, you’re making your MDM problem bigger.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

With your unyielding support and commitment, we built a highly ethical, disciplined and responsible enterprise. I have such fond memories of our journey and of the relationships we’ve developed along the way. Today, I find myself faced with complex emotions, i.e., pride and joy for what we have accomplished and sadness for the ending of our journey together. In closing, I wish you all continued success.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

M.S.R. owes its increased prominence as much to the transformation of the computing industry as to its own hard work. The explosion of data from sensors, connected devices and powerful cloud computing centers has created the Big Data industry. Computers are needed to find patterns in the mountains of data produced each day.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

How many times can people hear about small and nice and powerful the iPad Mini is until they realise it’s neither as small as the iPod Touch nor as nice as the iPhone 5, nor as powerful as the full-sized iPad? If Apple commercials told the truth, this hilarious ‘banned’ iPad Mini parody video would be what we would get to see on TV instead of manicured fingers swiping and tapping over hipster music. It’s hilarious.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

ING’s decision to deploy Oracle Fusion HCM was driven by its ongoing desire to strengthen HR’s role in driving the business. Oracle’s long-time PeopleSoft HCM customer evaluated the HCM market segment before selecting Oracle Fusion HCM to help strengthen its leadership position as an employer of choice and to continue using leading HR tools to maintain its position as one of the top employers in the Netherlands. ING will deploy Oracle Fusion HCM, working closely with NorthgateArinso, a Gold-level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork, who will be providing the hosting services, and Oracle Consulting Services. The financial services firm will deploy the full suite of Oracle Fusion Global Human Resources and Talent Management solutions, including Oracle Fusion Goal Management, Oracle Fusion OTBI, Oracle Fusion Workforce Compensation, Oracle Fusion Benefits, and Oracle Fusion Performance Management. Additionally, ING Bank Netherlands will deploy Oracle Fusion Financials, taking advantage of Ora

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In this case, all the devices being announced today run Android 4.2, the next version of Jelly Bean. Android 4.2 isn’t a complete overhaul of the software, but adds such features as a new keyboard, wireless video streaming services, a 360-degree photo feature, and a new Google Now service.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

With its minimalist design built around a set of online services, the device epitomizes the way we’re using computers mostly as consoles to stay connected to our personal collections of people, programs and media.

You can do this on a PC or phone, but many prefer a slim tablet that starts right up and runs a full day without recharging. Until recently the best option was an Apple iPad, but most every major tech company offers models in different sizes.

After a few days with Microsoft’s Surface, I think it’s a decent alternative, especially for people who haven’t yet added a tablet to their computing mix or have yet to strongly embrace the online realms of Apple, Google or Amazon.com.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Release 11.1 increases the performance, availability and I/O throughput of the new Oracle Database technology, optimises Oracle Database performance and enables Oracle Database administrators to identify I/O outliers and isolate network or storage bottlenecks, the company said.

The optimised shared memory interface between the Oracle Database and Oracle Solaris 11.1 provides 8x faster database startup and shutdown, as well as online resizing of the Oracle Database System Global Area (SGA).

Solaris 11.1 includes a new Oracle Solaris DTrace plug-in for Oracle Java Mission Control to enable customers to profile Java applications on Oracle Solaris production systems.

It also includes new cloud management features that will maximise network resource utilization and manage bandwidth in cloud environments, while the the built-in memory predictor monitors application memory use and provides optimised memory page sizes and resource location to speed overall application performance.

Release

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The phone survey of nearly 1,200 adults in the U.S. found 52 percent hadn’t even heard of Windows 8 leading up to Friday’s release of the redesigned software.

Among the people who knew something about the new operating system, 61 percent had little or no interest in buying a new laptop or desktop computer running on Windows 8, according to the poll. And only about a third of people who’ve heard about the new system believe it will be an improvement (35 percent).

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

For as concerned as I am about Tim Cook’s ability to lead Apple in a post-Steve Jobs world (or a post-iPod, -iPhone and -iPad world), I’m equally as excited by this we can’t call it predictable, but hardly surprising move.

Let’s not mince words.

Cook pulled a power play.

Earlier this year, Fortune referred to Forstall as Apple’s ‘CEO-in-Waiting.’ That doesn’t bode well for inter-office dynamics, particularly if Forstall believes his own press clippings (according to more than a few accounts, he does). And, for as secure as he probably is as CEO, Forstall’s “title” likely didn’t sit well with Cook.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

However, the latest layoffs were tiny, affecting perhaps 50 employees, and seem to be directed mostly at salespeople absorbed when Oracle bought Sun, our sources tell us.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Scott Forstall, the brilliant, but polarizing SVP who leads iOS, is out. As is John Browett who took over Apple’s retail operations earlier this year.

Forstall’s responsibilities are going to be split amongst three long time Apple execs.

Jony Ive, who leads hardware design, will lead Human Interface across the company.

Eddy Cue, who leads Internet services, will take over Siri and Maps.

Craig Federighi, who runs OSX, will also lead iOS development.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Not to be outdone by last week’s news of Apple’s upcoming iPad Mini, Microsoft and Google unleashed new mobile devices on Monday in what has becoming an increasingly crowded battle of wireless gadgets.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Steve Ballmer and Uncle Fester: separated at birth? You be the judge …

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Take a look at OpenOffice and LibreOffice’s plans for their next versions. You’ll find the same laundry list of features: better Office 2007-2013 OpenXML format support, and versions for tablets and the cloud.

In the meantime, after years of resistance, Microsoft says it’s finally supporting Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 with read, edit and save support in Office 2013. This means that there will finally be a single, high-end format that MS-Office, OpenOffice, and LibreOffice will all fully support. If Microsoft delivers, this could make both LibreOffice and OpenOffice much more attractive to end-users.

I have a modest proposal: Instead of wasting time and energy on duplicating work why doesn’t Apache join up with LibreOffice’s parent organization The Document Foundation and work together on a single open-source office suite? And, in particular why not work together on ODF and OpenXML support? Wouldn’t that be best for all OpenOffice/LibreOffice developers and users? I think so.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

AX 2012 R2 localizes the ERP applications for 36 country localizations by including specific regulatory requirements in various countries and localities. The update adds 11 new localizations for large countries such as Japan, India, Brazil, Russia and China, but also smaller countries such as the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.

Also new in AX 2012 R2 is a “talent management” system for matching the skills of job candidates to open positions within an organization. Microsoft added that customers in the U.S. can also now bring payroll processing in house where they can exercise better control of this sensitive data than with a third-party payroll processing company.

Besides specific new features for different industry siloes, R2 also adds tools to gauge business performance using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and other benchmarking capabilities for deeper analysis to deliver actionable business insights, wrote Kees Hertogh, director of Microsoft Dyn

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Right now, SAP charges 7.5 percent of a Customer OnDemand subscription for the new cloud integration option, with a minimum pricing “floor” of A!2000 per month, according to a presentation slide. Pricing for adding it to other cloud apps is expected to take a similar approach.

The cloud integration service will be offered in stand-alone form in the second half of next year, according to the presentation.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Still, with this video we get some solid evidence of the Nexus 10′s existence, along with a glimpse at that snazzy 2560 x 1600 display. From a display standpoint, the Nexus 10 certainly looks like an excellent tablet, and rumors have been suggesting that it has some solid innards to go along with that beautiful screen. We’ve been hearing that the Nexus 10 will be sporting a dual-core Samsung Exynos 5250 processor clocked at 1.7GHz, 2GB of RAM, a five-megapixel rear camera, and 16GB of internal storage. The source of this leak also confirmed that the Nexus 10 will have GPS, so we’ve got that to look forward to as well.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Google’s episode supposedly resulted in somebody’s employment termination, and the Big G police came knocking to track down the lost device. It essentially confirms that investors will see a new Nexus flagship smartphone on Monday — about time, since the last one (the Galaxy Nexus) was released last December.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

But, on the night of Sept. 20, Google wasn’t fighting the internet. It was up against a bartender, and Brian Katz, global investigations and intelligence manager at Google (according to his LinkedIn profile — “Google does not discuss the actions of its security team,” a representative says) was headed to the 500 Club.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

I have no doubt it would surprise many customers to learn that they have to make an additional investment of 40-50k€ (or more), plus ongoing support and maintenance, to enable bi-directional integration between two companies under the same umbrella that has claimed for years that Integration is their DNA. A few weeks ago the story was even worse as SAP had ALSO planned to charge additional licenses for NW PI to SuccessFactors but they recently changed course and do NOT plan to charge SAP ERP customers who have a run-time license of NetWeaver any additional cost to use NetWeaver PI OnPremise to connect and get bi-directional integration with SuccessFactors.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“It’s our ambition to grow with double-digit numbers for a very long time to come,” Euro am Sonntag quoted McDermott as saying in an interview published on Sunday.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Even if Oracle Team USA’s USA-17 had not capsized on Tuesday, the team would have needed to seriously considered their options in modifying USA-17 to take the larger volume, or bigger foils used by the New Zealanders.

Putting new foils/daggerboards into an AC72 is not a simple task and would have required a substantial rebuild, both in fitting the foiling mechanism, making the daggerboard cavity bigger, fitting a ‘V’ foil similar to the NZers, and ensuring that the platform was structurally strong enough to handle the new foil system.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Despite every single Surface variant selling out during its pre-order stages in several regions including the U.S. and UK, Apple CEO Tim Cook has labelled the device as a “compromised” and “confusing product”.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“In principle, we support ‘Do Not Track’ (DNT). Unfortunately, because discussions have not yet resulted in a final standard for how to implement DNT, the current DNT signal can easily be abused,” reads a Friday post in Yahoo’s Policy blog.
[Yes, it can be abused easily by NOT FOLLOWING THE DNT REQUESTS OF THE USERS -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Google has (wisely) decided to cancel its big Monday press event. It was originally scheduled to be held at Pier 36 in the city, which isn’t the best of places to hang out when the city’s even considering shutting down its mass transit system due to flooding.

According to The Verge’s T.C. Sottek, Google’s event location has now been designated an evacuation zone by the city, which rules any kind of product launches right out. The company hasn’t indicated when or where it plans to reschedule its event, which also now leaves the fun situation of Microsoft and Google butting heads with competing Monday press events resolved: Microsoft gets Monday to itself when hosting its press event from the pretty, lacking-severe-weather location of San Francisco, California.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In this cheat sheet I’ll show you how to get the most out of the new Start screen and its apps, the Desktop, the new Charms bar, Internet Explorer 10 and plenty more. I’ve also provided quick reference charts listing useful touch-screen gestures and keyboard shortcuts.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Mahaney was only indirectly involved in the incident involving the Facebook research, according to the settlement agreement by Massachusetts regulators released on Friday. But the actions of the junior analyst who worked for him provide an unusual glimpse into the type of behind-the-scenes information trading that regulators are attempting to rein in.

While the Massachusetts regulators did not identify any of the individuals by name, Reuters has learned that the incident involved TechCrunch reporters Josh Constine and Kim-Mai Cutler as well as Citi junior analyst Eric Jacobs.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The 11 quarters of growth coincide with the co-CEO era of Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann-Snabe. They launched the in-memory (Hana), mobile, and cloud strategy that make up SAP’s innovation story, and McDermott and Hagemann-Snabe said on Wednesday that these three areas are responsible for half of SAP’s growth in the more recent quarter.

Where do things stand where new products vs. core apps revenue are concerned? Software and support revenue accounted for 3.13 billion Euros ($4.04 billion) in revenue out of total of 3.95 billion Euros ($5.10 billion) in revenue reported in the third quarter ended Sept. 30. So software and support represents about 80% of revenue whereas the 63 million Euros ($81 million) in cloud subscription and support revenue represents about 1.6% of the total (with services revenue making up the difference).

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

3mm-thick keyboard is far from unusable and beats a virtual keyboard any day.

And besides, for a few bucks more you can get the other Surface keyboard that Microsoft is selling, which is a real keyboard — responsive and easy to use.

And as I’ve been saying for a while now, as an interface, I like Windows 8 and its dual personality.

For Microsoft, one of the more encouraging signs (I saw) was the intensity of interest. Customers had lots of questions about Surface and some sat there for 30 minutes or even an hour kicking the tires (or, in this case, pounding on the 3mm keyboard).

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP failures are rarely about the software…
SAP failures typically begin early in the sales cycle…

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

But those hoping for a mea culpa from Cupertino shouldn’t hold their breath. Apple goes on to toot its own horn and highlight the parts of the judge’s ruling that criticize Samsung’s tablets – particularly that bit about how the Galaxy Tab lineup is “not as cool” as the iPad.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“They do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design. They are not as cool.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

But if the state were to take the millions of dollars it annually spends on such givebacks — among them a much-publicized tax credit for the film industry — and plow it into tax reform, Pennsylvania could lower its corporate net income tax from the current 9.99 percent to 8.39 percent, Benefield said.

Such a reduction would move the state from the second-highest corporate tax rate in the country to the 15th highest, Benefield noted.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“My biggest concern is that people are going to get these tablets, realize their limitations and then return them in droves,” he said. He said that the biggest challenge for Microsoft is explaining the difference between Windows 8 and Windows RT to consumers “because they are very different.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Gartner’s top predictions for IT organizations include the following:

Through 2015, 90% of enterprises will bypass broad-scale deployment of Windows 8.
Windows 8 is Microsoft’s attempt to bring the touch interface to its flagship product to counter gains by Apple in rapid-growth markets. Microsoft had to make this change to modernize its offering, and its approach is to push IT organizations to this new interface as quickly as possible. However, most enterprises and their trusted management vendors are not yet prepared for this change, and Gartner predicts that enterprises will want to wait for more stability before proceeding. While Microsoft as a technology company can make these changes at a more advanced pace, the preponderance of the customer base cannot move so quickly. The market will take time to mature, and most enterprises will sit on the sideline for now.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

1. Mobile Devices Battles
2. Mobile Applications & HTML5
3. Personal Cloud
4. Internet of Things
5. Hybrid IT & Cloud Computing
6. Strategic Big Data
7. Actionable Analytics
8. Mainstream In-Memory Computing
9. Integrated Ecosystems
10. Enterprise Apps Stores

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

PAUL CEGLIA, the defendant, willfully and knowingly, having devised and intending to devise a scheme and artifice to defraud, and for obtaining money and property by means of false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises, for the purpose of executing such scheme and artifice and attempting so to do, would and did place and caused to be placed in a post office and authorized depository for mail matter, matters and things to be sent and delivered by the Postal Service, and would and did deposit and cause to be deposited matters and things to be sent and delivered by private and commercial interstate carriers, and would and did take and receive and cause to be taken and received therefrom, such …

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

This is a complex sell, and the staff in this particular store didn’t seem to be up to it. We assume that the Times Square staff would be as well trained on this as anyone, given that they operate in walking distance of the Apple Mecca on Fifth Avenue. But they just didn’t seem to have a well rehearsed set of talking points to explain what is a admittedly a tricky proposition: this is just like the Windows you know and love, but it’s not the full Windows you can load your games and software onto. If you want that, a full version called Surface Pro is coming at a later date that can’t yet be revealed. This one is called Windows 8 RT, and the RT doesn’t stand for anything (seriously) and there’s also a regular Windows 8 (without the RT) available available right now, just over there in the other part of the store, running on regular laptops that also have touchscreens, but not on these laptops with these touchscreens, because they are running on a different kind of chip, called ARM. What

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

His alleged crime: doctoring, fabricating and destroying evidence to support his claims. The feds described his lawsuit as a multi-billion dollar scheme to defraud Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[President of HP? -DBM]
Cisco CEO John Chambers was his usual, cautiously confident self, and Oracle president Mark Hurd exuded confidence that Oracle’s new strategy has finally come together, and CRN’s news editor Steve Burke was exasperated by the waste behind the American Recovery and Re-investment Act money that went to technology companies (some of whom will thoroughly surprise you).

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

NetSuite posted a loss of $8 million, or 11 cents per share, compared with a loss of $6.9 million, or 10 cents per share, in the same quarter last year. Excluding one-time charges, the company posted an adjusted profit of 8 cents per share for the recent quarter.

Revenue rose 31 percent to $79.8 million.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Apple chief executive Tim Cook panned the new rival offerings in a call with analysts and investors.

Cook said Apple made “hard choices” when creating the iPad so that it didn’t try to do too many things. “I suppose you can design a car that can fly and that floats, but I don’t think it would do all those things very well,” Cook said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

So of the 25 million tablets shipped, Android accounted for about 41 percent of them, while 57 percent were iOS.

Worth noting is that Apple’s 14 million units shipped were all one or two models: the 3rd-generaion iPad and the cheaper iPad 2. Android, on the other hand, is a wilderness of sizes, brands, and prices. The Kindle Fire has been calculated to be the single most popular Android tablet, and other standouts, like the Nook and Nexus 7, have also moved quite a few units. But there are hundreds of smaller brands and cheaper devices that also contribute to the total.

Apple’s new iPad Mini, unveiled Tuesday, might give a boost to sales, and the next year may also see Microsoft’s new tablet, the Surface, in the mix. Pre-orders for the least expensive Surface sold out recently. And, Google, too, may yet have a surprise up its sleeve: An event on the Monday promises new tablets and possibly an updated operating system.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Samsung Electronics announced a profit of 8.12 trillion won ($7.4 billion) in the third quarter, nearly double last year’s figure, as strong sales of high-end TVs and Galaxy smartphones more than offset reduced orders for chips and screens from Apple. Meanwhile, arch rival Apple Inc, also had a good quarter, reporting earnings that met expectations after the bell. The stock fell 1.5 percent in extended trade.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Amazon shares fell $5.57, or 2.4%, to close at $222.92 before the company released its results. At one point in after-hours trading, Amazon shares fell an additional $2.48.

The Seattle company posted a loss of $274 million, or 60 cents a share, much more than the 8-cents-a-share loss that analysts in a Thomson Reuters survey had anticipated. In last year’s third quarter, Amazon earned $63 million, or 14 cents a share.

Sales for the quarter rose 27% to $13.8 billion. Analysts had expected $13.9 billion.

Looking ahead, Amazon said fourth-quarter results that include the crucial holiday shopping season could range from a $490-million loss to a $310-million profit.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Lower-than-expected profit and disappointing iPad sales capped off a rocky month on Wall Street for Apple, which has seen its shares fall 13% since the release of the iPhone 5 on Sept. 21. The stock was so volatile that trading in Apple shares had to be temporarily halted right before the company released its earnings Thursday.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Apple’s announcement on Tuesday may disrupt the market as much as its own profit margins. How the technology giant will pull this off and still generate a profit out of the smaller tablet business — including its ‘original’ iPad business — remains unclear. It’s worth taking a look at the winners and losers.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Indeed, this is where the real advantage of Windows 8 lies: it enables an existing desktop experience (and the megatons of enterprise software based on that experience) to live another day in a hybrid tablet, while enabling a new generation of software based on multi-touch creation and consumption to redefine the enterprise software experience.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Sit back, relax, and in a few weeks I’m sure you’ll be loving the whole Windows 8 groove. And definitely, definitely don’t downgrade if you buy a new machine with Windows 8 pre-installed. You’ll be missing out on a fantastic operating system.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Earnings per share for the quarter were €0.70 (65 cents), down 2.3% year over year on constant currency, and 6.7% below the Zacks Consensus Estimate.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Whitman said the smartphone is the main Internet access device in many countries. “I don’t know how we can be HP without having the full range of devices,” she said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Any serious and knowledgeable observer of the IT market has to debunk the half-truths, falsehoods, misleading statements and myths contained in Oracle’s claims.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott tells CNBC’s US “Squawk Box” SAP had record software earnings in Q3. Big Data and strong innovation drive profit. McDermott optimistic on Europe. Watch it here.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

NetSuite Inc. on Thursday reported a third-quarter loss of $7.98 million, or 11 cents a share, compared with a loss of $6.93 million, or 10 cents a share. Revenue was $79.79 million, up from $60.96 million. Adjusted profit was 8 cents a share. Analysts were expecting a profit of 6 cents a share, on revenue of $78.04 million, according to a consensus survey by FactSet.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Record Q3 Revenue of $79.8 Million, a 31% Year-over-Year Increase
Non-GAAP Net Income Grows 49% Year-over-Year
Operating Cash Flows of $15.2 Million, a 61% Increase Year-over-Year

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The company said earnings per share on a non-GAAP basis were 8 cents, beating the consensus view of 6 cents. Sales were $79.8 million versus an expected $78 million, and rose 31 percent over the year-ago quarter. The company earlier this month announced a two-tier version of its suite of business applications, aimed at larger customers.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Presenters: Will Poweel and Nic Doodson, Keytree Store Trek is a personalized virtual shopping experience, allowing you to shop in your own home with the familiarity of a supermarket and an experience that is tailored to you in full 3D. You can see live products in complete aisles of products, compare sizes, see offers, and peruse the market. Prepare for a whole new way of shopping, powered by SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver Cloud.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In addition, the company announced a partnership with bwin.party, an international gaming operator that will enable real money casino games like poker, slots, and roulette in the U.K. That opens up a potentially lucrative new revenue stream for Zynga.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

At Radian6, Salesforce.com is reported to be laying off “less than 100 people.” And at Buddy Media, the company amended its 8-K, which shows $20 million in net losses for the first six months of the year.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

But margins are likely to be under pressure. Cloud computing isn’t yet profitable for the industry because it demands large upfront investments and a critical mass of users. SAP reckons it needs around €2 billion in cloud revenues to make an operating profit, which it expects to achieve by 2015. In the near term, the acquisitions are weighing on margins; SuccessFactors shaved one percentage point off operating profit margins in the third quarter. And with more new products to sell, SAP added 6,800 staff in the first nine months of the year. The pace of hiring slowed in the third quarter, but operating expenses were still 20% higher year-on-year.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Jim Hagemann Snabe, Co-CEO of the German software company SAP, talks to CNBC about their positive earnings after an eleventh quarter of double digit growth and the strategy that is driving their growth.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[pp.38 on are very interesting… -DBM
I think that this is one of the most unbelievable, unforgivable debacles ever
seen in the area of IT and government contracting in the history of Australia. A contract which started
out at $6 million has grown into a monolith potentially approaching $1.25 billion or more. As I have
indicated previously, that is like paying $400 for a Mars Bar or $7 million for a base model Commodore.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

IBM had been paid a total of $21 million as of March 2010. A KPMG audit later revealed that the bungled implementation would cost a total of $1.25 billion to fix in the seven years to 2017.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The National Football League and SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced a new multiyear marketing sponsorship that will make SAP the Official Cloud Software Solutions, Business Software and Business Analytics Software Sponsor of the NFL. The sponsorship will allow SAP to redefine the fan experience with innovative technology for the most passionate fan base in all of sports.

The NFL will utilize cloud solutions from SAP to support the continued innovation and enhancement of NFL.com’s Fantasy Football platform. Through the implementation of on-demand SAP® solutions, SAP and the NFL will team up to deepen the NFL.com Fantasy Football experience, providing fans with enhanced analytics and functionality within the game.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Software revenue grew 17 percent to A!1 billion, while software and software-related service revenue was up 19 percent to A!3.2 billion.

Profit was however down 51 percent to A!618 million from the same quarter a year earlier

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP HANA revenue was €83 million ($107m), keeping the company on track to reach full-year expectations of approximately €320 million ($415m). Mobile revenue tells the same story — the firm expect to reach a revenue of €220 million ($285m) by the end of the fiscal year, and revenue has currently reached €48 million ($62m).

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Microsoft this week is launching its new Xbox Smart Glass app, which will tie together Xbox content with tablets, PCs, and phones, the company announced.

Redmond plans to release Xbox SmartGlass alongside Windows 8 and its Surface tablets this Friday, Oct. 26. The free SmartGlass app will initially be released for Windows 8 and Windows RT devices, though support for Windows Phone 8, iOS, and Android devices is also on tap. The app essentially turns your tablet, PC, or phone into a “smart second screen” for your Xbox 360.

“Your phone and tablet will become the best remote controls in your house,” Yusuf Mehdi, chief marketing officer for Microsoft’s interactive entertainment division, wrote in a blog post Monday. “Use the touch screen on your smartphone or tablet to control your Xbox 360, and use your devices to pause, rewind or advance entertainment.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Mobile problem? What mobile problem?”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Third Quarter 2012 Software Revenue Increased 17% to €1,026 Million (12% at Constant Currencies)
Third Quarter 2012 Non-IFRS Software and Software-Related Service Revenue Increased 19% to €3.21 Billion (13% at Constant Currencies)
Triple-Digit Growth in Key Innovation Areas: Cloud, SAP HANA, Mobile
Third Quarter 2012 Non-IFRS Operating Profit Increased 10% to €1.24 Billion (4% at Constant Currencies)
Year-over-Year Comparison of 2012 Third Quarter IFRS Operating Profit and Operating Margin Impacted by Profit in Q3 2011 of €723 Million From the Reduction in the TomorrowNow Litigation Provision
SAP Refines Full-Year Revenue Guidance and Includes the Expected Results of Ariba

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In June 2010, Workday entered into a lease agreement with Lake Tahoe Land Company, an equipment leasing business owned by David Duffield. The contract provides for equipment financing credit for purchases of information technology and related equipment for use in Workday’s business operations. To date, Workday has borrowings outstanding of $3.8 million (the percentage rate of the loan hasn’t been disclosed). Though not detailed, the wording of the documents also suggests that Workday is paying rent on space for unspecified office properties, too (lowned by Duffield?).

• In January 2009, Workday entered into a consulting agreement with Nevada Pacific Consulting that employs the latter company to “provide finance and administrative services to us on a part-time, as needed basis.” As of January 31, 2012, Workday had paid a total of $114,000 in consulting fees. The owner of Nevada Pacific – one David Duffield.

• Duffield’s son Michael works as a general manager on Education & Government

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In a word — losses.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Customer Data Solutions has affirmed that Informatica offers a leading approach enabling customers to achieve the many benefits of customer master data management.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Pincus said the cuts would accompany a regime of “more stringent budget and resource allocation around new games and partner projects,” hinting at a fundamental change for a company that was known for expanding aggressively through hires and acquisition deals before it went public to fanfare last December.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

With its HD display, sleek Android software and extremely affordable price tag, the Nexus 7 poses one of the biggest threats, in terms of sales, to Apple’s new smaller tablet this holiday season.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP buyers need to know the following:

You can squeeze SAP with alternatives. Investigate Oracle, custom development, third party maintenance and SaaS as options instead of SAP. “Using SaaS providers of services, particularly in the areas of HCM and CRM but also increasingly even in finance, can be effective; reinventing the homemade solutions, especially using offshore resources, and looking at third-party support options, such as Rimini Street, all provide good leverage,” said Neapolitan.
SAP pricing is different based on region. List prices vary around the world. Europe is the least expensive option for SAP buyers. SAP happens to be based in Germany.
Discounting is more aggressive today than it has been in the past—especially for those large transactions that make or break a quarter.
SAP customers are struggling to justify the enterprise support offering. Standard support may be a better option.
License capabilities not products so there’s not product bundling

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The bill would allow employers that hire 250 new workers to keep 95 percent of the workers’ state income taxes, money that would otherwise be sent to the state treasury.

Supporters say the program would stimulate job creation, while critics say it would unfairly penalize existing companies that are not expanding and create border wars between states.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Microsoft just completed its makeover of Office Web Apps, adding improved touch support for phones and tablets and a modern sheen to complement the upcoming Windows 8.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

IBM has added new capabilities to Hadoop and Cognos, and has started a cloud analysis service as well

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

According to Oracle president Mark Hurd, the number of devices supplying data back to businesses and enterprises will boom to 50 billion by the end of the decade.

Hurd told The Times of London (paywalled): “Data is growing exponentially — in some cases, by 35 to 40 per cent a year. This is causing big problems for our customers and tremendous economic pressure. Most of our customers are trying to innovate while cutting costs.”

Hurd said that the world was “drowning” in vast amounts of data — which has grown eightfold in the past seven years — and companies are running out of space to store it all. With more than nine billion existing devices connected to the Internet, end businesses are struggling to cope with storing the vast amounts of data they collect.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In this interview with Data Informed Staff Writer Ian B. Murphy, Moore discusses why MDM is key for creating insight from enterprise data, how to get a MDM project off the ground and what obstacles to avoid to ensure success. (Podcast running time: 17:09.)

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Microsoft’s initial stock of Surface RT devices has sold out in the United States. The 32GB base model, at $499, sold out earlier in the week, but all stock has now been depleted with a wait time of within three weeks rather than a guaranteed October 26th delivery. Alongside the sell out, a number of UK readers are reporting that Microsoft has delayed the release of Surface by a week.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

One of the main issues is that during jury selection Hogan was asked if he’d been involved in any lawsuits. He did mention one, but failed to disclose a breach of contract case from 1993 between him and his former employer, Seagate. Last year, Samsung became the single largest direct shareholder of Seagate. According to Samsung’s legal team, that fact — along with the strong feelings about patent rights that Hogan expressed to this publication and others — indicate that he could have been biased against the company.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

A source with knowledge of Google’s plans has told The Next Web that the search giant has been distributing a video recorded at one of its weekly all-hands “TGIF” meetings on its internal network, which details the devices that will be unveiled at its hastily arranged October 29 event (which we will also be attending).

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Surface is going to make some kind of history for Microsoft, one way or another.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

So while Microsoft will capture (or, perhaps the more accurate word is retain) significant market share with its move to Windows 8, its days of being the dominant operating system of the computing world have come to a close.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“You will see a very active acquisition and merger environment in this market,” Drakos said. “It’s a great time for new [social] tools from new combinations of vendors and offerings.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

IBM has seen business get tougher as September started. Some big software deals in the emerging markets that Big Blue is so enamored of are slipping into later this year, and the launch of new System z mainframes and the impending launch of Power7+ systems (and the confusion around where and when they would come out) didn’t help IBM’s hardware sales do as well as they might have had the timing been different. But the timing wasn’t different, and in the quarter the company’s revenues were off 5.4 percent to $24.75 billion and net income actually fell by four-tenths of a percent to $3.82 billion.

Both numbers were lower than what Wall Street had been expecting, which is why IBM’s shares are off 5.6 percent and down below $200 a pop as we go to press. Wall Street doesn’t like surprises, but in a jittery global economy with an election in the United States causing a certain amount of deer-in-the-headlights, plus a new CEO at the helm at Big Blue, there was bound to be some trouble.

IBM’s

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The weakness, particularly in the global services units, appears to be company-specific, rather than a malaise afflicting the whole sector, Bernstein Research’s senior analyst argued. At the end of the day, this will benefit “transformation-oriented” firms like Accenture, which will manage to escape secular challenges such as maturing markets and increased competition.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The risk is that cloud computing threatens to undermine the business of selling traditional software programs and related consulting services that help companies to run finance, human resources and supply chains. Instead of buying those expensive programs and paying companies like IBM to install, run and connect them with other systems, many customers are increasingly choosing the cheaper option of renting software from cloud computing providers like Salesforce.com, NetSuite and upstarts like Workday, which just held a very successful public offering.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Hiring John Swainson, who ran IBM’s middleware business as WebSphere was born and became a force and then CA Technologies as it was seeking to redeem itself, was the first step. In June, Dell was able to convince Don Ferguson, who was chief architect for IBM’s Software Group and an IBM Fellow and who did stints at Microsoft and CA for a few years, to become CTO for Dell’s Software Group.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Pioneering developer of mobile software management solutions set to be multinational technology corporation’s 12th acquisition in Israel, its second acquisition in Israeli mobile market

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Marius, I recently noticed John setting some aggressive goals for himself in the software business. I’m curious if you’ve got goals of your own that you’d like to share?

Swainson: I said two things: My short term goal is $2 billion in revenue by 2016. Today, we’re at about a billion and a half. That will be our run rate at year end. That’s not highly unrealistic. The longer-term goal, and I don’t have a time frame on it, is to reach the $5 billion range. If you calibrate the business versus the other pieces of Dell, to balance things out, it should be about a $4 billion or $5 billion business, something like that.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Dell Enterprise Solutions president Marius Haas stressed the need for intuitive products that cut down on data center complexity while providing scalability and affordability. Noting the $12.7 billion Dell has spent in acquisition investments, Hass announced the company’s proposed answer to these needs: the Active Systems platform, a suite of converged infrastructure platforms designed to simplify deployment of virtual desktop infrastructures and private cloud deployments.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s new development strategy has raised tensions by requiring chip makers to pick a couple of computer or mobile-device makers as lead partners. The idea, used by Google, is to ensure hardware and software work well together.

But chip-company executives have said they hate picking a few favored partners from among their customers.

In addition, Microsoft blindsided computer makers in June with plans for its own competing Surface tablet

Few of them have publicly criticized Microsoft, but people who speak to the companies regularly use words like “dumbfounded” to describe their reaction.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Essentially, Microsoft gets paid regardless of what version of Windows many big customers actually use.

And Windows is also declining in financial importance for Microsoft, although the sales of PCs often determine the strength of Microsoft’s earnings. Five years ago, it accounted for almost 30 percent of Microsoft’s sales. Last year it was 25 percent.

Microsoft’s success in selling to businesses, in the short term at least, depends less on Windows than on its Office products and its fast-growing server and tools division.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Sound like any EnSW vendors you know?]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

However, “the caution, maybe, is to understand it’s still a new product,” he added. There are frequent patching cycles and when SAP finds new bugs that means the school has to arrange for time to apply them and perform testing…
It’s wise to contract with SAP for consulting help on a HANA project at this stage, according to early customers. In addition, it’s possible to get direct feedback from SAP’s product development team when issues crop up, users said. That may be harder to obtain over time if HANA sales ramp up as much as SAP hopes they will.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

As he’s climbed the corporate ladder, Sinofsky has become one of the most polarizing figures at Microsoft. CNET interviewed 15 current and former Microsoft executives and executives at companies that partner with Microsoft, all of whom have worked directly with Sinofsky. Most requested anonymity because they feared potential repercussions. They paint a picture of an executive who is incredibly smart and passionately driven to ship quality software on time. But some also say Sinofsky can create a toxic work environment that has chased talented employees away from a maturing company that’s in desperate need of innovative thinking. Yet Sinofsky has appeared to have consistently had the support of Gates and Ballmer.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Google and Microsoft are going to be squaring off with competing product announcements on October 29.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Chrome OS also has all its usual built-in benefits. There’s no need to ever update any applications because everything is based on the cloud. The operating system itself, unless you go out of your way to stop it, automatically updates it. You also don’t need to customize it. Once you’re signed into Google, it automatically syncs all of your Chrome bookmarks, settings, extensions and applications. Share it with a friend? No problem, they login to their Google account and they get all their Chrome settings, apps, and so on.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Apple has removed its homegrown browser plugin for Java from OS X with the Java 2012-006 1.0 update, and is encouraging users who need Java in web browsers to download the Oracle JVM directly.

This is a notable change, but not surprising: Apple deprecated its own JVM exactly two years ago (“deprecated” = developer jargon meaning “We don’t plan to work on this any more, and you should not count on it being around for all that much longer”). Oracle is now offering a v7 OS X build that’s comparable with the Java packages for other operating systems.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

There is a real tendency if you already have an on premise solution to:

ensure you don’t cannibalize the revenue coming in from that solution
use the pricing of the existing solution to determine the price of the SaaS version

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Google doesn’t really care if Android makes it in the enterprise. It’s a consumer platform. The cloud-centric Chrome is its enterprise play.

Let’s recap:

The first Chromebook was released at $349 more than a year ago. The price was good, but not great. But Samsung’s sleek new $249 Chromebook aggressively undercuts the $499 iPad on price the way many observers thought Microsoft needed to do with the Surface RT.

Instead, it’s the new Chromebook that is:

– half the price of the iPad and the Surface RT;

– half to one-third the price of Windows 8 convertible tablets (see my gallery of 17 of them here). Without keyboards, most of these Atom-based ‘tabtops’ or ‘laptablets’ run between $500 and $900;

– one-third to one-fourth the price of Windows 8 ultrabooks, which run between $800 to $1,200.

At these prices, what CIO or IT manager wouldn’t give the Chromebook a serious look?

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Twenty five percent of the nation’s startups and 52% of those in Silicon Valley were founded by immigrants.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

A data governance initiative must build competencies, assign roles and responsibilities and invest in technologies to enable these core processes no matter the scope and scale of your business objectives. A pilot data governance project focusing on improving the quality or security of a single data item, phone number as an example, should follow the same approach as a holistic data governance function that’s managing all business critical data assets. The difference of course is the level of effort, time, resources and enabling technologies required to effectively deliver business value. The process to validate, cleanse, improve, and monitor the quality of ‘phone number’ in a single application for a single business unit – while far from being a miniscule task -will be significantly less effort than managing hundreds, thousands or more business critical data entities across an entire global enterprise.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc @Benioff opens Cloudforce New York live from the Javits Center. He shares his insights into how the social revolution is changing business as we know it. He speaks with Martha Poulter, CIO, GE Capital, about how salesforce.com products have transformed the way that GE does business.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Google. Microsoft. Facebook. Intel. Hewlett-Packard. What do these companies have in common? All got fabulously rich on business models that thrived on traditional personal computers. All are struggling to adapt to a new world in which mobile devices will dominate. All are getting punished by investors in the meantime.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

@Benioff maintained that Salesforce.com isn’t keen on going further into back-office processes for now. “We integrate with the back-office providers like SAP and Oracle but we want to be that dominant front-office provider, and that’s the piece we’re focused on,” he said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Marketing Cloud ecosystem enables companies to identify sales leads, discover advocates, uncover social influence, track sentiment in multiple languages and more – empowering marketers to make better business decisions based on social media data, Salesforce.com said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Among those that got away: photo-sharing service Instagram, which was sold to Facebook Inc. for $1 billion earlier this year; social scrapbooking site Pinterest Inc.; GitHub Inc., which lets developers write and collaborate on software projects; and Path Inc., a social-networking service.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Simmer said the team is due to receive a new wing sail early in the new year. That wing sail, being built in Auckland, New Zealand, was to have been used for a second AC72 catamaran. The platform for the second boat, including the hulls and crossbeams, is being built in San Francisco.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The filing was made under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, which allows companies to file to go public with the Securities and Exchange Commission without disclosing those documents to the public until it nears an IPO.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The biggest miss appears to have been from Motorola…Google still missed across the board…Google’s advertising cost per click is falling…Google says it wasn’t planning an early release, which sent the stock cratering…Google is giving up a huge chunk of its gains for the past several weeks.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

820 venture capital deals raised $6.9 billion during the third quarter, a 32% drop in funding compared with the same period a year earlier.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Windows 8 has a new Start screen and features that work well with today’s touch-based user interaction

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Windows will now consist of two very different user experiences bound into a single package. The idea is it’s a one-size-fits-all operating system, which can run on everything from older, mouse-driven PCs to touch-controlled tablets without compromise. Everything from a touch-based weather app to mouse-driven Excel will run on it. That’s a big contrast to Apple’s approach, which uses separate operating systems for its iPad tablets and more standard Mac computers.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Today there are over half a billion Android devices-half a billion – with 1.3 million more being activated every day. You should all run out and buy the Nexus 7 tablet for $199. It’s had rave reviews and recently won “Gadget of the Year” from T3, the gadget experts. You’ll love the integration with Google Play. It is an amazing device.

This time last year I announced that our run-rate for mobile advertising hit $2.5 billion. That seemed like a pretty big number — even for Google. Now we have built up additional mobile revenue from users paying for content and apps in Google Play. Including these new sources grossed up, I can announce our new run-rate for mobile is now over $8 billion. That’s quite a business.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Though the sagging PC sales were expected, some analysts said they were surprised by a step back in growth at other parts of the company, including in the division selling back-office software that runs on server systems. The 8% revenue increase in that division, called Server & Tolls, is a comedown from prior quarters—perhaps a sign businesses have curtailed spending on computer technology.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Some 30% of online buyers began researching their last online purchase with Amazon, compared with 13% researching a product on Google, according to a new Forrester survey of nearly 4,000 US respondents.’

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The second paragraph of the press release merely read “Pending Larry quote,” suggesting that space was reserved for comment from CEO Larry Page.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Trading was halted on Google stock after the price plunged Thursday, following the early release of Q3 earnings reports.

The company’s stock was plunging after it released its third-quarter earnings report early, apparently by mistake.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Google continues to rocket forward. Let’s not forget Apple was slammed back in July and they’re doing just fine,” Ken Marlin, an analyst at Marlin & Associates, told FOX Business. “I do think it’s a buying opportunity.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Join our webcast for a walkthrough of SAP NetWeaver Cloud’s great features:

Standards-based development and run-time environment, so no lock-in or steep learning curve
Connectivity service that enables native integration with SAP and non SAP systems –
on-premise or cloud-based
Federated identity management across cloud and on-premise applications, via SAP’s ID service (authentication, SSO)
Portal capability for quickly building websites that connect applications, reports and unstructured content from SAP and non-SAP sources

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle, like many companies, is sitting on billions in cash right now. Does anything change after the election? Do you see anything loosening up in terms of business?

A: Stability is always good for the economy. I’d have to say hopefully with the election, we gain stability, and the ability to focus on growth in the economy. If that happens, it’s going to be even better. There’s no question to us a growth economy is better than not.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Conventional wisdom tells us that CIOs should focus on “feeds and speeds,” which is another way to describe infrastructure and applications. However, that coventional wisdom is wrong; today’s CIO must become a business leader who stands on equal footing with other C-level counterparts. That’s the best way to avoid Bob Evan’s four threats that lead to CIO suicide.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[92 Oracle Exadata jobs posted at Dice.com, across a broad range of employers -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Starting up an SAP HANA instance on AWS takes only a few minutes, plus some time to download, install and configure SAP HANA Studio. If you have done it before, all those tasks combined will take much less than 30 minutes. And if you have never done it before, we put the required steps at your fingertips at www.cloud.saphana.com.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

$0.99 per hour.

The service will be offered on AWS in instances with RAM capacities as high as 60GB. Customers will be able to purchase and provision the instances through the AWS Marketplace portal.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

So this means that Hana on Amazon is geared toward smaller businesses or smaller apps and isn’t really a replacement for buying the Hana appliance, or for using SAP’s new cloud, for a typical enterprise database. As for those other fees, Hana One costs 99 cents an hour, plus another $2.50 per hour for the Amazon hardware that provides 60GB of RAM. That’s a total of $3.49 per hour. Amazon could charge other fees, too, depending on how much data is being used.

To compare, SAP’s entry-level price for Hana for companies that aren’t already using its other business software starts at roughly $52,000.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Still only 76 SAP HANA jobs posted on Dice.com, mostly with SAP SI’s like IBM and Deloitte -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Only 1 Oracle Exalytics job posted on Dice.com – and it is at Oracle -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Why might Salesforce be motivated to ditch Oracle? For one, there’s the cost — though Monash speculates that Salesforce has a favorable licensing deal with Oracle. And there’s the apparent hostility between Benioff and Ellison.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP jumped into the cloud platform-as-a-service market on Tuesday by launching the first in a series of planned cloud-based application services and database services. Announced at the vendor’s annual TechEd conference in Las Vegas, the new services make SAP a more comprehensive cloud player and open up new points of competition with the likes of Oracle and Salesforce.com.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Workday has been actively poaching talent from other Bay Area companies with many new recruits going back to their previous employers to lure their former co-workers. According to some industry insiders, Workday has also been offering its employees referral bonuses starting at $5,000 to motivate new talent acquisition. Workday founders Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri have a reputation for being role models with their open and transparent leadership styles; however, Workday is also known to operate like a sweat shop with employees averaging at least 60 hours a week.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

A nearly $8 million, 72-foot catamaran used by the Oracle Team USA, the defending America’s Cup champion, capsized during practice near the Golden Gate Bridge Tuesday and was severely damaged. There were no injuries but the $2 million wing of the new ship was was “damaged beyond recognition,” team officials said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

So, at some point, maybe in 2013, Virgin’s seatback video screen will greet you by name and know your Elevate status when you sit down on your flight. It will offer you food and drink based on what you’ve ordered on previous flights.

If your flight is delayed, it will push information to your seatback regarding connecting flight information or changes– and provide you with alternatives before you land. It will also provide access to your Elevate account.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“The first two SDKs available are for Java and PHP. The Rackspace Cloud SDK for Java leverages the popular jclouds open-source library. It has full support for OpenStack Nova (Rackspace Cloud Servers) and OpenStack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files),” the company announced. “The Rackspace Cloud SDK for PHP uses the Rackspace-developed php-opencloud library, which supports Nova, Swift, Rackspace Cloud Networks (preview access), and Rackspace Cloud Databases. “

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

What is the strategy for growth at Oracle?

A: We’ve got a fairly simple strategy. Offer customers best-of-breed technology at every level. Second, integrate those technologies into engineered systems where we do the work for the customer, make it simpler. Third, we are moving our application suite to the cloud with what we call fusion cloud applications. And fourth, we are focused on industries. That strategy manifests a whole suite of products that we’ve announced over the past, you know, year and a half, two years. As part of that strategy, we’re spending $5 billion of R&D this year and rolling products out into that strategy. And we think it’s going to the core of this trend you see in IT, which is how do I just make things simpler? How do I make it easier? How do I modernize it, standardize my IT infrastructure?

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

64 GB with Black Touch Cover

Pre-order now for delivery by 10/26

$699.00
32 GB with Black Touch Cover

Pre-order now for delivery by 10/26

$599.00
32 GB without Black Touch Cover

Order now for shipment within 3 weeks

$499.00

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The first Surface tablet, Microsoft’s dramatic foray into the hardware business, is available for pre-order starting today. It will be available for purchase in stores starting Oct. 26.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“As a high-tech entrepreneur and someone who has actually used Google’s advertising tools to grow my businesses, I encourage the Commission to tread carefully and not undertake action that would compromise the important service provided by Google, reduce Google’s ability to rapidly innovate and improve its products, or make search engine results less useful for consumers or businesses,” he wrote.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

European regulators did not explicitly call Google’s policy illegal but identified a range of shortcomings that they said could undermine user privacy and confidence in the company. The regulators made numerous recommendations that would allow Google to improve compliance. “As data protection regulators, we expect that Google takes the necessary steps to improve information and clarify the combination of data, and more generally ensure compliance with data protection laws and principles,” the letter said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Responsibilities:
* Design and implement major pieces of the salesforce.com core database infrastructure
* Formulate, implement, and evaluate algorithms and database techniques to support service scalability and stability

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Much as Salesforce might like to move off Oracle altogether, for cost as much as bragging rights, completely junking Oracle is probably not an option anytime soon. It is not clear that Postgres could operate at anything like the scale of Salesforce. Even if it could, Salesforce would have to spend a lot of time assuring customers that their data would not be affected. Given the marketing zeal of Salesforce, in fact, it would probably make a case that life was becoming even more fabulous.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Holy crap.

Workday is off to a spectacular public market debut. After coming public Friday at $28 a share, the provider of cloud-based HR software rallied 74% on the first day of trading – and today is up another 8%. The stock lately is trading at $52.67, up another $3.98.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Oracle’s products are a mishmash” of different kinds of software, Mr. Bhusri said. “It’s the same for SAP.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

WDAY is significantly trailing CRM@7 years. WDAY’s revenues are 43% of CRM@7’s revenues (134m vs. 310m), yet Workday’s costs are 73% of CRM@7’s (213m vs. 290m). That’s a big discrepancy. Where are these costs coming from?

Well, Workday had 1096 employees to CRM@7’s 1304 (i.e. Workday had 84% of CRM@7’s number of employees to produce 43% of their revenue, yet still incur 73% of their costs). That means WDAY saw $122k rev per employee vs. CRM@7’s $238k rev per employee, so nearly a 2x favor to CRM@7.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)